Hmong Kitchen: The pleasures of pepper

While the word has been getting out more widely about Madison’s food hall, early support came from within the vendors’ individual communities. In the case of Hmong Kitchen, the owners knew they could connect with the Hmong population in Madison, even as they started with hand-held crowd-pleasers (egg rolls and crab Rangoon) at the Monona Farmers’ Market.

“Growing up in Madison for 20, 30 years, there were hardly any Hmong restaurants,” said Zang Vang.

At Hmong Kitchen, Vang is in charge of “paperwork and PR stuff.” His wife, See Xiong, runs the day-to-day business with her business partner Byang Yang and Vang’s brother, Zoua Vang.

When considering their first permanent venture, the partners liked the Global Market’s location — near the interstate, with connections to Green Bay, Milwaukee, and beyond. They wanted to expand their menu beyond the “finger food” Xiong and Vang had been selling in Monona.

“We signed the contract, and then COVID came and we were all panicking,” Vang said. “Everything was shutting down.”

The stall opened in September 2020, making it the only Hmong restaurant on the east side. That presented new challenges: the kitchen was very small, too tight for a full-service restaurant or even substantial catering.

“We realized we could not serve that much food,” Vang said. “We don’t have the storage for it. … We changed our menu to more like fast food.”

Vang, who previously worked in public relations for the Hmong Association, set up a Facebook page and a website, and began promoting Hmong Kitchen’s ginger-seasoned pork sausage, sticky rice, papaya salad and Hmong pho to friends and family. In Madison, about 6,000 Hmong people make up the city's largest Asian ethnic group.

What the food hall offered, Vang found, was the appeal of built-in variety.

“If you have family in from out of town, you want to go to a restaurant, right?” he said. “At Global Market, you don’t have to order the same thing the person next to you ordered. You can go to a different vendor … if you like noodles, Chinese food, even Mexican food.

“When people started seeing that, they really liked it. They can order different foods.”

Hmong food is similar to other Southeast Asian cuisines like Thai or Lao, Vang said, with variations in things like egg roll fillings (less cabbage) and a fiery sauce, often called “pepper,” made with chili peppers, garlic, citrus and fish sauce, among other things.

From family to family, there are endless variations of this sauce, which comes with everything from pork belly to chicken leg quarters.

“That’s what Hmong people have on their dishes, whether they have breakfast, lunch or dinner,” Vang said. “We all have peppers on it. It’s a spice that everybody loves. … It’s like the ketchup at McDonald’s.”

The Global Market & Food Hall is unique, Vang said. The “live fish and lobsters … you don’t find that in Madison a lot.” It encourages people to step outside what they’re familiar with, to try something new and delicious.

“The majority of our customers know what the food is,” Vang said. “The other half haven’t tasted the food before. Papaya salad, they don’t have that in the Chinese community. … The Global Market attracts customers from different backgrounds and the grocery store has its own unique Asian food.

“The whole place is pretty interesting,” he said. “I think it’s going to grow. People are knowing more and more about it.”