32 DECEMBER 2020
OBSESSIONSFinding Home in a Food Cart La Vang-Herr is on a
mission to turn heads toward Hmong-American cooking.
By Khushbu ShahAT F I RST, you might not think much of the small food truck in
the back corner of an unassuming parking lot, tucked behind
a Little Caesars. You might even miss it as you drive 20 minutes
west of Portland, Oregon, beyond the Nike headquarters in
Beaverton, to the little town of Aloha. But to skip over @La’s,
a Hmong Food Cart would mean missing not only some of the
best Hmong cooking in the nation but also the starting point
of what La Vang-Herr, the force behind @La’s, hopes will be a
national Hmong food movement.
Like many Hmong Americans, Vang-Herr and her family
came to the United States as refugees in 1978 as a consequence
of the Vietnam War. They arrived in Dallas before settling down
in Milwaukee, in a tight-knit Hmong community where food
was central to every major life event. When she moved to Oregon
in 2015 to be with her husband, Steve, she was shocked by how
hard it was to find Hmong restaurants and some of the ingre-
dients she loved the most, despite the sizable Hmong population
throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Over dinner one night, a friend who knew that Vang-Herr
had long been an avid cook planted the idea of her opening herown Hmong restaurant. “She told me, ‘You know, you’re so
passionate about our culture. Lead the way,’” Vang-Herr recalls.
In 2017, she left her job as the development director for a non-
profit, and a year later, she opened her food cart.
People flock to @La’s for her menu of Hmong classics with
a few twists. Perhaps the most beloved item are her Phat Wings;
her chicken wings are deboned and stuffed generously with a
mixture of slippery glass noodles, carrots, mushrooms, and two
kinds of ground meat—turkey and pork—then fried until crackly
and crisp. These wings, like most items from Vang-Herr’s truck,
are served snuggled up next to a pile of sticky rice. On a sunny
day this past February, @La’s special was a dish called ncuav, a
mochi-like cake made from sticky rice. Ncuav is traditionally
cooked in banana leaves, but Vang-Herr adapted the dish to her
food cart and pan-fried the rice paste into crispy triangles with
crunchy exteriors and molten middles, which she serves with
a very American accompaniment—maple syrup.
The star of the cart, however, is the Hmong sausage, made
from a secret recipe that Vang-Herr doesn’t divulge, revealing
only that it’s made with juicy ground pork and aromatics likeTHE TASTEMAKERFOOD STYLING: LA VANG-HERRphotography by CELESTE NOCHE