2024 was the year in which the Twin Cities went from having zero high-end Hmong restaurants to having not one, but two. The second of those to open was Chef Yia Vang’s Vinai. We ate there in late October and thoroughly enjoyed our meal. It was tempting to make plans to go back to Vinai very soon after that meal to try more of their menu but we decided to first try the other restaurant, Chef Diane Moua’s Diane’s Place, which had opened earlier in the year, serving brunch, and expanded to dinner in November. Those plans—and at one point, reservations—kept getting pushed back for one reason or another but we finally got there this past weekend. We’d taken our boys with us to Vinai and they joined us at this meal as well. We were all looking forward to the meal a lot. Did it live up to our hopes and expectations? Read on.

Chef Moua, as you may know, is a mainstay of the Twin Cities fine dining scene. She first came to prominence as the pastry chef at La Belle Vie and has since left her mark on the dessert menus at a number of high-end Twin Cities restaurants, both defunct and extant. Diane’s Place, however, especially at dinner, features savoury Hmong fare. My write-up of Vinai includes some thoughts on aspects of the cultural discourse around immigrant cuisines when they first enter the high-end of the market. If you’re interested in that—applicable also to Diane’s Place—you should click on over after you’ve read this report.

After some minor hassle with finding street parking, we arrived on time for our reservation at 6.45 pm. The restaurant was full. The dining room is not as large as Vinai’s and feels more intimate: which is a nice way of saying that you will be closer to your neighbours here than at Vinai. There’s one row of two-tops and four-tops along the wall, another central row of four-tops and then a bunch of seating at the bar that extends through most of the dining room. There are another three seats at a window counter near the front. And there is apparently another seating area in the interior where I did not venture. There also appears to be a fair bit of picnic table seating outside alongside the restaurant; assuming it’s connected, these should get a lot of use in the warmer months.

We were seated at the four-top closest to the entrance in the center row. On the one hand, this meant we were not hemmed in by tables; on the other hand, for a bit there were a large number of people waiting by the entrance, some of whom were more or less right on top of us. But once the tables turned at 7 pm, everything calmed down. By then we were already stuck into our drinks. The missus got a glass of rosé and I got a cocktail named I Love You, Say It Back! for some reason. A take on a Margarita, I want to say, this featured tequila, guava and Alma Tepec (a chile liqueur) and I rather liked it. The boys got Cokes.

As at Vinai, the menu does not have Hmong names for the dishes (though at Vinai the sections of the menu do). At both restaurants this is obviously an acknowledgment of the reality of who is mostly dining there but I think it would be okay to push that demographic a little bit outside their comfort zone and make them sound out the names of dishes. At any rate, we went over the menu and consulted with our pleasant server on the order. We were going to get everything to share and she suggested 7-8 dishes. We picked eight and then at the last moment decided to strike one. A good thing too since we still generated a fair amount of leftovers to take home (portions are not minimalist). What did we get?

In the first wave were the following:

• Green Scallion Croissants. This was the younger boy’s pick and we were glad he talked us into it as these were both very good in their own right and also proved to be handy with mopping up the sauce with another dish that arrived a couple of minutes later.
• Sticky Fried Rice. This was a large bowl of rice (more like sticky steamed rice than fried rice in texture) with broccolini, tomato, shiitake mushrooms and a fried egg on top. (There’s also the option of adding chicken for an extra $5 but we declined.). You give it all a good mix a la bibimbap. This was rather good—though it benefited more than a bit from a lashing of the Hmong Hot Sauce that we got on the side (this was indeed a rather hot sauce).
• Sauteed Eggplant. This was the missus and my dish of the night and to our utter shock the boys not only asked to try eggplant (never before has it passed their lips) but liked it very much as well. The sticky, savoury, salty sauce the eggplant—right at the border of holding its shape and custardy—sits on is very tasty but the dish itself doesn’t come with any steamed/sticky rice. So we mopped some of it up with our croissants and held on to it for later.
• Sour Pork Short Ribs. There’s quite a lot of very tasty sour pork ribs to be had on the affordable end of the spectrum in St. Paul and I am happy to say that this held its own with the best of them (especially once dosed with a bit of that hot sauce).

Oh yes, we’d also got a side of the pickled mustard greens along with the hot sauce and it was very good as well. The tables are not very large and things got a bit cramped with four dishes in the middle (plus a bowl for the pork rib bones); any more and it would have been unmanageable. We held on to the eggplant, as I said, and waited for the next wave to arrive. This took a bit longer than expected and then we had a full table again. I also got a second cocktail at this point: Shady D (bourbon, tamarind and Averna)—a take presumably on a Manhattan, or maybe an Old Fashioned. I liked this one even more than the first.

• Diane’s Hmong Sausage. This is served with sticky rice and a choice of either the Hmong hot sauce or sweet & sour sauce. As we already had some hot sauce on the table we opted for the sweet & sour (and we declined the over-easy egg supplement). The sausage, fried to a crisp, was dynamite and we enjoyed it greatly with the sticky rice and both sauces. There was a good amount of the sticky rice served with the sausage which meant we had enough for the eggplant as well.
• Red Curry Soup. I’m sorry to say that this was a bit of a disappointment. It’s a very attractive dish as presented with rice noodles, mussels, head-on shrimp, bamboo and soft-boiled egg but the curry soup itself was too mild and thin for our taste. The boys, who usually guzzle noodle soup of any description down by the gallon, did not finish their portions and even the missus and I laboured to do so. This was a case where we thought the more refinded fine dining version replete with high-quality ingredients fell short of more robust versions of the classic dish available at the food courts in Hmongtown Marketplace and Hmong Village.
• Eggroll Stuffed Chicken. Unfortunately, this did not improve matters. The dish had sounded very good: roast chicken with an eggroll-style stuffing on a bed of sauteed bitter greens. Well, the greens were very tasty and the eggroll stuffing was fine, but the chicken itself was overcooked and dry.

We were on a bit of a downward trajectory here but decided to chance our arm on dessert anyway. There aren’t very many on the menu—though the server listed a few more. We got the Chocolate Custard (with sauteed banana and croissant ice cream) and a scoop of the evening’s sorbet, which turned out to be Apple-Ginger. I’m happy to say we enjoyed both greatly, ending the meal on a positive note.

For a look at the restaurant, the current menu and everything we ate and drank, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and to see how much it all cost.

Service was a bit of a mixed bag. Our lead server was pleasant and generally on top of things. However, some of the young staff who brought dishes out and cleared the tables seemed like they might be new to the job; or at least that’s how I’m interpreting demeanor that might otherwise be described as stand-offish or even sullen. But it’s not like this marred our experience; it was more amusing than anything else. And I will say that there’s a bit of an unresolvable space conundrum here. On the one hand, this is food that should be eaten “family style”; on the other, the tables are too small to do so comfortably. But the space itself is not large enough to accommodate larger tables without losing a few. Of course, if you’re in a group where everyone does an individual starter-main thing, that won’t be an issue (and you’d probably have to do individual dishes if eating at the bar or the smaller counter).

Price? With tax and tip the total came to about $305. Which puts it right in line with the cost of our dinner at Vinai (where we ordered more food but fewer drinks). The meal itself we enjoyed less, on the whole, than we had our dinner at Vinai. It started out strong but then faltered in the second half before recovering with dessert. That’s not to say it was not a good meal, but we’ll go back to Vinai before returning to try more of Diane’s Place’s menu (which may turn over anyway, I suppose). It’s not a competition, of course: if you haven’t already, you should eat at both.

Okay, I’m off to Delhi soon for a couple of weeks. My next restaurant report will be from there. Twin Cities dining reports will resume in April.