In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

Yia Vang is the chef and owner of Union Hmong Kitchen, a restaurant in the Graze Food Hall in Minneapolis’s North Loop, and he’s about to open Vinai in the center of the city. Vang was born in Thailand as a Hmong refugee and grew up in the Twin Cities, which has the largest Hmong population outside of Southeast Asia. The Hmong are traditionally mountain-dwelling people in mainland Sout...

Tonii Hicks grew up in north Philadelphia with her two sisters and parents who had a water ice stand — Philadelphia’s version of Italian ice — that also sold pretzels, fish platters, chicken sandwiches and other straightforward food. She hadn’t planned on going into food as a career until she ended up at the Swenson Arts & Tech High School, which has vocational training...

Adijatu Jalloh runs her own catering company in New York City, is the head grill chef at Cut by Wolfgang Puck and is one of the chefs of Resident which hosts pop-up events showcasing aspiring chefs in the city. And she’s only 22 years old. Jalloh has been cooking ever since she was a little girl in the West African country of Guinea, where she prepared her father’s meals with her stepm...

Jahqyad Austin is the executive pastry chef and owner of Jahqyad’s Twist, a mail-order cookie bakery based in New York City. Although in his early 20s, Austin has been cooking for years, starting by selling cupcakes in grade school and then studying culinary arts at the Food & Finance High School in New York. He also bot involved with the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, or C-CAP,...

Meghan Lee has been in the restaurant business since she was a teenager, working up and down the East Coast from Philadelphia to Nantucket until she opened her own restaurant, Heirloom, a seasonal fine-dining restaurant in a Victorian house bult in 1899, in the beach resort town of Lewes, Del., in 2015. In July of 2021 she and her executive chef of five years, Matthew Kern, parted ways. “It...

Chef Gavin Kaysen is the founder of Soigné Hospitality Group in Minneapolis, which operates Spoon & Stable, Demi, Mara, and Socca Café restaurants in that city as well as three Bellecour Bakery locations. He also runs two catering companies. Spoon Thief Catering, named for the award-winning chef’s penchant for collecting silverware, is available for anyone to hire. KZ Provi...

Gozu is a modern American restaurant in San Francisco with the unique approach of including some type of premium Japanese wagyu beef in every single dish. That could include the meat itself, the fat that is made into a form of garum — the ancient Roman version of fish sauce — and everything in between. Most customers order the restaurant’s tasting menu and one of four pairings: W...

You might have seen Selena Tan in the hit 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians , in which she played Alix, one of the friends of the male romantic lead’s mother, but she recently visited New York City to promote the opening of Daisy’s Dream NYC, an offshoot of Daisy’s Dream Kitchen, which her mother Daisy opened 12 years ago at the age of 60 in a hawker stall in Singapore. Daisy’s D...

Hollis Silverman played an instrumental role in expanding José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup. As its chief operating officer she oversaw the group’s food & beverage, service and human resources teams as it tripled in size from a small collection of restaurants to a national empire. Now she’s running her own company, Eastern Point Collective, which at the moment is a s...

Rob Connoley is the chef and owner of Bulrush, a restaurant in St. Louis that seeks to put the traditional cooking and foodways of the Ozark region — northern Arkansas, southern Missouri and parts of Kansas and Oklahoma — into a fine-dining restaurant context. That has meant a lot of research into family journals and letters from the 19 th century, as well as extensive work with the Os...

Ji Hye Kim arrived in New Jersey from South Korea at the age of 13 and found her way to Ann Arbor, Mich., the way many people do, as a student. She made a home for herself there, but although there were already good Korean restaurants in the college town, she missed her mother’s cooking. So she started to cook her own food and eventually opened a restaurant, which has won local accolades as...

Ricky Moore is the chef and owner of Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, N.C., which specializes in a rotating line of mostly local and seasonal fish and shellfish, plus his own interpretations of specialties from eastern North Carolina. The food is all re-envisioned through the prism of his own culinary experience, which includes growing up as an Army brat in Germany, traveling the world as an army...

“It’s very easy to find something that’s both delicious and that you’re going to feal really good eating,” said Seamus Mullen, who is currently the culinary director of the Rosewood Sand Hill resort in Menlo Park, Calif. Responsible for overseeing that property’s culinary outlets, developing recipes, training and so on, Mullen also has a broader mission to help...

Andy Lansing has worked at Levy Restaurants for the past 34 years, and has been CEO since 2004. He came about that role via the unusual route of being hired as the company’s general counsel. Being a naturally curious person, he poked his head around different aspects of the business and learned so much about the company’s operations that he became chief operating officer in 1995 after...

In early April, Robert Ash joined the Encore Boston Harbor Hotel as executive director of culinary operations. That means he oversees the Wynn Resort property’s banquets, catering and in-room dining as well as its 11 restaurants (including a Shake Shack and possibly the only 21-and-over Dunkin, which is located on the casino floor) and 4 bars and lounges. Ash got his start cooking “out...

If you don’t think of Oklahoma City as a prime culinary destination, Andrew Black would suggest that you think again. The chef and owner of Grey Sweater — a tasting menu-only restaurant where Black’s staff interviews guests as they take their reservations to plan out their meals — and the more casual Black Walnut, says he’s not the only restaurateur in the city to fle...

At the turn of the century, Rocco DiSpirito and Troy Guard were both executive chefs in New York City. DiSpirito was turning heads at the adventuresome Union Pacific, and Guard was cooking his interpretation of Roy Yamaguchi’s Asian-fusion cuisine at Roy’s restaurant at the World Financial Center. Their careers took different paths. DiSpirito went on to be a cookbook author and TV pers...

Amelie Kang is the co-founder of Málà Project, a 3-unit restaurant concept in New York City specializing in Sichuan dry pots, which are similar to what we think of as Mongolian barbecue here in the United States: The customer’s choice of raw ingredients quickly stir-fried together. The main difference is the Sichuan flavor profile called málà. Má is the Man...

Okan Kizilbayir has been the chef de cuisine of Salt at the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island in Florida for almost a year now, but he has been cooking with seafood for decades. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, from a family of cooks, he grew up on great fish and shellfish from the Mediterranean as well as the Black Sea. Not long after culinary school in Turkey he ended up getting hired at a Ritz-Carlto...

Amarit Dulyapaibul is the managing partner of three concepts in Chicago that are part of the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises empire: Three-unit Ramen-san, two-unit Sushi-san and the 11-week-old Omakase Room. Dulyapaibul grew up in restaurants, the child of immigrants from Thailand who ran a number of Thai dining establishments in downtown Chicago, including Star of Siam. “I grew up in the...

Kevin Tien, like many first-generation Americans, especially those with Asian backgrounds, was supposed to do something extremely professional, which is why he got a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in business intelligence and business analytics. But that took a while, and while he was doing it he was also working his way up the ranks of Tsunami, a Japanese restaurant with lo...

Jim Meehan might not love being a cocktail legend, but that’s what he is. The founder of Please Don’t Tell, better known as PDT, in New York City, and author of its cocktail book helped introduce Americans to a new sophistication in mixed drinks, with house-made syrups and tinctures and complex combinations graciously presented. Now he’s doing it with more factors in play at Taki...

Caroline Bell co-founded Café Grumpy in 2005 in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Greenpoint, partly because she was an office worker who was having trouble finding a decent cup of coffee nearby. “I’m like, how hard can it be to make a good cup of coffee?” she said. One cup of coffee, or a decent pot of coffee, might not be that hard, but Bell soon found herself immersed...

New York City native Justin Cucci has spent the past couple of decades in Denver, where he operates four restaurants — Root Down, Linger, Vital Root and El Five — and also has licensed a Root Down to the operators of Denver International Airport. He’s about to reopen his fifth restaurant, Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, an entertainment venue that shut down at the start of the...

The new Poppy & Seed in Anaheim, Calif., is up and running and new concepts are underway