FEATURES | MIDWEST
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Some of the Best Meals Start With Women in Charge
By Jamie Dutton | March 27, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With family spread across the Midwest and a job that has her in airports near daily, Jamie Dutton finds herself across the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs a Bell's.
I end up in Minneapolis-St. Paul for work a few times a year, and a while back I started noticing something that felt unusual, then increasingly impossible to ignore. I’d be having dinner at my favorite places—Hai Hai, Myriel, Diane’s Place, Khâluna, Oro by Nixta, and Pizzeria Lola—and finally it clicked. At every one of them, there’s a female chef in charge.
Then it finally occurred to me: this must be the American metro area with the largest percentage of female chefs running things.
That should not feel radical by now, but in the American restaurant business it still is. In most cities, finding even one or two women leading the most interesting kitchens can feel like a short list.
Not so in Minneapolis-St. Paul, it started to feel like the opposite. The places I was craving, the restaurants that felt most alive, most personal, most worth building a night around, kept tracing back to women.
In looking to document this, there are many we could’ve included in this article. But we narrowed it down to six, the female chefs who have had a major influence here. What they show: the Twin Cities have restaurant scene where women are not an exception to the story, but one of the main reasons the story is worth telling.
Ann Ahmed
Gai Noi | Khâluna | Lat14
Ann Ahmed came to the United States from Laos as a child after her father died, spent time with her family in a refugee camp in Thailand, then landed in Minnesota and eventually found her way into the daily work of her mother’s Lao Market on Nicollet. That matters because Ahmed was not shaped by food as a hobby or a lifestyle accessory. She was shaped by it as family labor, survival, memory, and identity, the kind of upbringing that tends to build either toughness or purpose, and in her case it built both.
As a chef, Ahmed is self-taught, which in her case reads like a hard fact about how she moves through the world. At 25, she opened Lemon Grass without a business plan, living in her mother’s basement and walking to the restaurant each day. Her first team was basically family. From there came Lat14, then Khâluna, then Gai Noi, each one feeling less like a copy of the last and more like a chef getting bolder about saying exactly who she is. “Cooking is the core of who I am. It’s my work, my craft, my passion, my spirituality, my entire existence,” Ahmed once told Artful Living.
Ahmed is not just one more successful chef in a great food city. She helped widen the city’s palate. Her restaurants have color, swagger, and actual perspective. They do not feel like softened explanations of Southeast Asian food for reluctant Americans. They feel lived in. They feel like the work of someone who came out of displacement, family hustle, and years of figuring it out herself, then decided Minneapolis-St. Paul was ready for more Laos, more heat, and a lot more of Ann Ahmed.
Ann Kim
Hello Pizza | Kydred Hearth | Pizzeria Lola
Ann Kim has lived about four professional lives, which may be why her restaurants feel so fully inhabited. She came to the United States from South Korea as a child, grew up in Apple Valley, went to Columbia to study English, worked at a law firm in New York, then moved back to Minneapolis to act. There are easier ways to become a pizza legend, but none of them would have made Ann Kim.
Kim spent years trying on identities that did not quite fit, whether that meant the corporate world or an acting career where she has spoken candidly about not fitting the boxes people had for Asian performers. What followed was not some romantic leap into the kitchen. It was a second act built on work. She taught herself to cook in a serious way, studied under Tony Gemignani, and in 2010 opened Pizzeria Lola with her husband, Jordan Smith, in a former convenience store. Minneapolis has been eating the benefits ever since.
Pizzeria Lola made the city rethink pizza. Hello Pizza gave her a cleaner East Coast slice-shop lane. Young Joni, before its 2025 closure after a lease dispute, turned Kim into a national figure and helped cement her as one of the most important chefs this region has produced. But the larger point is not that she won awards or landed on television. It is that she made ambition feel natural here. She took immigrant memory, professional reinvention, fermentation, fire, and sheer stubbornness and turned them into restaurants that helped Minneapolis grow up.
During her acceptance speech in 2019 for the James Beard Best Chef: Midwest award, she told the crowd: “My journey has not been easy. It has not been linear and it has not been traditional.”
Kim changed the city’s restaurant language, and because so much of what came after her now feels possible partly because she dragged it into existence.
Christina Nguyen
Hai Hai | Hola Arepa
Christina Nguyen didn’t come out of some famous kitchen in Copenhagen or spend years chasing hierarchy in New York. She and her husband, Birk Grudem, started Hola Arepa as a food truck in 2011, serving Venezuelan street food. Then they opened the brick-and-mortar. Then they opened Hai Hai. Then everybody started paying attention to what they were doing.
How Nguyen got there is a classic American story. She grew up in Minnesota as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and Hai Hai carries that background proudly. The menu pulls from Southeast Asian street food, family memory, and travel, but the larger gift of the restaurant is confidence. Opened in a former strip-club-and-dive-bar space, it’s now one of the liveliest restaurants in town, the sort of place that can be fun without losing precision. And through it all, she’s never forgotten that her parents got her there. In her acceptance speech after winning the Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Midwest award in 2024, she said her parents “taught me that anything is possible, to not be afraid.”
Before the Beard medal, there was already plenty of evidence. Hola Arepa landed on Bon Appétit’s best list. The tostada chilaquiles hit the cover of Food & Wine. Hai Hai became the kind of restaurant people in Minneapolis started using to show off the city. Not in a chest-thumping way. More in the quiet, satisfied way of people who know they have something good.
Nguyen represents a very Twin Cities kind of excellence: understated at first glance, deeply assured once the food hits the table, and built from family history, hustle, and taste rather than mythology. She did not need the national validation. But she sure does deserve it.
Diane Moua
Events by Diane | Diane’s Place
Diane Moua spent years becoming one of the most respected pastry chefs in the Twin Cities before opening Diane’s Place and making it clear that dessert was never going to be the whole story. Her résumé is serious enough to make other cooks take notice: Le Cordon Bleu, La Belle Vie, Spoon and Stable, Bellecour, Demi, plus a long run of James Beard semifinalist and finalist nods for pastry. The impressive part, though, is not that she built all that technique. It is what she decided to do with it.
Moua grew up in central Wisconsin in a Hmong family whose parents came to the Midwest as refugees after the Vietnam War. She grew up on a 120-acre farm and in a house where people were fed as a matter of principle. The cooking that shaped her was not just fine dining. It was hospitality with stakes. It was food as care, obligation, memory, and home. So when Diane’s Place opened in Minneapolis, the restaurant did not feel like a pastry chef trying something new for fun. It felt like a merger between the polished restaurant career and the food she had been carrying with her all along. Moua once told Food & Wine: “To me, going home and cooking Hmong food is my happy place.”
That is what makes the place so interesting. You can see the technical discipline all over it, in the pastry case, obviously, but then also in the dinner menu, where punches are never pulled, like the whole egg roll stuffed chicken. Moua has built a restaurant around Hmong flavors, family-style dishes, and the idea that comfort food can still be exacting. It is warm without being soft. It is personal without turning sentimental.
Moua shows how female leadership in the Twin Cities can look both refined and deeply rooted. She did not abandon the pastry world to become someone else. She used everything she learned there to build a restaurant that is one-hundred percent her.
Kate Romero
Oro by Nixta
Kate Romero’s restaurant is, on the surface, a Minneapolis restaurant built around masa, heirloom corn, and serious Mexican cooking. Underneath that, it is a story about process, memory, migration, and the kind of chef who cares enough about an ingredient to build a worldview around it.
A Minnesota native, Romero took the long route through Chicago, Krakow, Minneapolis, and San Francisco before returning home and building Oro by Nixta with Gustavo Romero, whom she met while working in California. Their first move was not to open some flashy full-service restaurant. It was a tortilleria, a place grounded in nixtamalization, heirloom varieties, and the idea that tortillas were worth taking seriously. That alone would have made them an important part of the Twin Cities food scene. Then they opened Oro by Nixta and pushed the whole thing further.
What I like about Romero is that she does not fit the old caricature of the lone genius chef barking orders under pendant lighting. Her work is collaborative, product-obsessed, and deeply tied to questions of culture and agriculture. Oro by Nixta is the kind of restaurant where the ingredient is the point, not an excuse. Corn shows up not as rustic theater but as the center of the room, the menu, and the mission.
We asked her about why there’s so many female chefs running things in her city, and Romero credited customers first, saying it’s “a direct result of the city being intentional about equity, and not just talking about it, but providing opportunities.” She added: “It reflects our commitment to progress, challenging norms in a traditionally male dominated field, and valuing talent and inclusion.”
Romero represents a newer version of culinary leadership in Minneapolis-St. Paul, one that is less interested in ego and more interested in doing the hard, patient work of teaching a city to taste differently. In a town surrounded by cornfields, that turns out to be a surprisingly radical thing.
Karyn Tomlinson
Myriel
Karyn Tomlinson didn’t grow up plotting a restaurant career. She has described a childhood with plenty of family hospitality but not much restaurant culture, then a post-college life where gardening and cooking for people became the thing that made sense. That helps explain why Tomlinson’s restaurant Myriel never feels like a chef flexing technique for sport. It feels like a person building dinner from the ground up, literally and otherwise.
From there, the path sharpened. Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Corner Table in Minneapolis. A win at Cochon555 that made her the first woman to take the title. Then, eventually, Myriel in St. Paul, which has become one of the defining restaurants in the Twin Cities not because it shouts but because it doesn’t need to. Tomlinson’s food carries French technique, rural Midwestern instincts, Swedish family roots, and a deep relationship to farms, but none of that arrives as lecture. It arrives as white beans, pie crust, broth, preserves, whole animals, and plates that feel exact without turning stiff. It all came together thanks to the turn she took to the soil. “After college, I started working on my garden, and that’s when it clicked for me,” Tomlinson told VIE Magazine.
There is nothing small about what she has built. Myriel has become a national story because it is so clearly itself, and because Tomlinson understands something a lot of chefs never quite get: refinement hits harder when it still feels human. Her restaurant can be beautiful without losing the sense that someone actually wants to feed you.
Tomlinson represents a form of female culinary power the Twin Cities has gotten unusually good at recognizing: serious, grounded, precise, and deeply place-specific. She did not chase restaurant celebrity. She built something better, and then the awards followed.
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