Vinai + Diane’s Place
The New York Times | Minneapolis, Minnesota
When the NYT named Vinai one of the 50 best restaurants in America in 2024, it wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention to what chef Yia Vang had been building in northeast Minneapolis for years. Diane Moua's Diane's Place had drawn the same kind of attention. Together, the two restaurants had become the clearest argument for Hmong cuisine as one of the defining voices in American food right now.
The assignment put me inside both spaces — two restaurants, two chefs, two distinct environments — covering food, portraiture, and atmosphere across multiple shooting days. Restaurant editorial work is a discipline with its own particular pressure: you're working around active kitchens and service schedules, without full lighting control, trying to produce food shots, environmental frames, and portraits that feel like they belong to the same story. The spaces do a lot of the work if you let them. Vinai's architecture is autobiographical, with its V-shaped ceiling trestles referencing the rooflines of the Ban Vinai refugee camp, its cinderblock benches referencing Vang's father's work as a carpenter when the family arrived in the United States. There's no shortage of details worth staying with.
For food and hospitality brands looking to document a culture, a kitchen, or the human story behind a product, this is the kind of assignment that sharpens the instincts most useful to that work.
