Coming to America: A Conversation with local first- and second-generation immigrant chefs

by

In many ways, America is built on the labor, ideas and entrepreneurship of immigrants. From the Pakistani food carts of New York to the Korean corner stores of L.A., to the Mexican taco trucks of Lexington, the immigrant presence has been an inescapable, driving force among modern American cuisine and the small businesses that in many ways epitomize “the American Dream.”

For a city its size, Lexington boasts an impressive array of immigrant-owned food businesses. Lexington’s “culinary evangelist” Dan Wu recently sat down with three staples of the community’s culinary landscape who have both drawn from their respective ethnic cultures and at the same time broken away from them to make their own unique marks on the city’s food culture.

By Dan Wu

I came to the United States in 1982 as an impressionable Chinese 8-year-old who knew only two things about America: cowboys and hamburgers. Having never seen either of these things in person, I had no idea what they really meant. Growing up in the States (first in North Dakota, then in Kentucky), I quickly assimilated into my new home, learning English in no time and steadily losing my Mandarin. From my latchkey kid days in elementary school, I learned to cook for myself, scrambled eggs and ketchup being my first dubious creation. My dad was a grad student and my mom worked in Chinese restaurants, and we mostly ate at home, except on the rare occasion when we’d treat ourselves to a few boxes of KFC.

Later, my parents became franchisees. My dad, scientist that he was, eschewed the more predictable ideas of opening a Chinese restaurant or nail salon, instead researching the top-growing franchises of the day. McDonald’s was out of our financial reach, so Subway it was. Yes, for a time, I was a “sandwich artist.” Without knowing it, the seeds for my future career in food were planted.

My dual-culture upbringing helped equip me with a nuanced understanding of the interplay between food and culture, and it was in this space that I nurtured my love of culinary fusion. My childhood go-to dish was boiled macaroni, without the cheese and topped instead with a mélange of my mom’s Chinese leftovers. This eventually evolved into my “Home Alone and All Grown Ramen,” the dish that won me a coveted apron in 2014 on Fox’s “MasterChef” cooking competition.

I recently sat down to dinner with three other prominent members of Lexington’s culinary and business community to talk about how the immigrant experience has shaped them, their food and ultimately, Lexington’s culinary landscape: Toa Green, a Thai-American born in Lexington; Craig de Villiers, a recent emigrant from South Africa; and Martine Holzman, a longtime French expat. Among them, they own a Thai street-food eatery and burgeoning ice cream empire; a pastoral farm-to-table restaurant; and a venerable cake and pastry institution. We talked about our backgrounds and experiences and discovered many more commonalities than differences – not the least of which is our meandering career paths. They are three of the many faces of Lexington’s vibrantly diverse culinary scene, and our conversation confirmed that my experiences as a first-generation American chef are just one small sliver in the mind-blowingly diverse tapestry that is the overall immigrant chef experience.

Martine Holzman

Owner and pastry chef, Martine’s Pastries

Food was always an essential part of Martine Holzman’s life. Growing up in a small village of 500 in central France, where “everybody knows everyone else’s business,” her parents worked on her grandparents’ small family farm and her mom cooked at the local restaurant. After she made her way to California in the 1980s to study psychology, Holzman’s wanderlust got the best of her and she never finished school. She met her future husband, Jim, an American, and they went back to France for seven years. During that time, they traveled together, venturing all over the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Back in France, Holzman earned a culinary degree, moved back to California and landed a traveling sales job that first brought her to Kentucky.

Lexington’s Southern hospitality and proximity to Red River Gorge sealed the deal, and they’ve been here ever since. After working as a caterer and private chef, Holzman saw an untapped market in Lexington and started her own eponymous wedding cake business. Today her cakes and pastries are on restaurant menus all over town (including Toa Green’s Crank & Boom Ice Cream Lounge).

Toa Green

Owner of Thai & Mighty Noodle Bowls and Crank & Boom Ice Cream

The first in her family to be born in the United States, Toa Green is in many ways the archetypal first-generation child of immigrants. Her parents migrated to Kentucky in the early 1970s from a small town in central Thailand and eventually opened their own small business in 1990: Smile of Siam in Frankfort (now under new ownership as Thai Smile). Green’s first job was filling water glasses for her parents’ restaurant. It took both of her little 7-year-old hands to hold the pitcher.

“Just like a family farm,” she said, “everyone has to contribute.”

After studying journalism and marketing at the University of North Carolina and a stint working for Habitat for Humanity that took her overseas, Green felt the pull of her roots. In 2011, she took over Thai Orchid Cafè, the Lexington restaurant her parents had opened in 2006. Since then, she has worked steadily to put her own mark on Lexington’s culinary scene.

Recently rebranded as Thai & Mighty, a change has taken shape in the restaurant, which now features a food truck and has moved away from the traditional cuisine of her culturally conservative parents to focus on Thai street food.

Green says it’s a reflection on her own “mutant Thai-American” identity.

“The style isn’t based on a region or anything,” Green explained. “It’s just stuff I like.”

Growing up a child of immigrants, Green was the “weird kid with the weird lunch” with the name no one could pronounce. She channeled that sense of difference into an asset, a way of standing out.

The past several years have been a whirlwind of entrepreneurial frenzy as she and her husband, Mike, launched Crank & Boom Ice Cream, Thai & Mighty mobile and most recently, Crank & Boom Ice Cream Lounge in the bourgeoning Distillery District on Manchester Street. Their always-on-the-move ubiquity is aptly summed up in their slogan: “Here Comes the Boom.”

Craig de Villiers

Executive chef and owner, Graze Market & Cafè

Craig de Villiers never intended to move to America – what started as killing time in Texas in 2007 ultimately (if circuitously) led to opening his own restaurant in Kentucky. Growing up in South Africa, he had wanted to be a professional hunter like his dad and was in the States taking clients hog hunting while he waited to be old enough for a hunting license in his home country. Ultimately, his homeland didn’t feel like the place to pursue his dreams, and de Villiers ended up working with horses at Lane’s End in Versailles – dealing with large animals in a completely different way than he was used to.

After five years at the farm, he stumbled quickly into a sous chef then executive chef position at Bellini’s Italian Restaurant in downtown Lexington, a trial-by-fire experience for the self-taught chef.

He said he had always cooked at his grandmother’s side growing up in Swaziland.

“There was nothing to do,” de Villiers said. “I worked, played Sevens rugby, and we cooked every night. And we watched all my favorite chefs on BBC.”

Less than a year after his stint at Bellini’s, de Villiers and then-co-owner Laurentia Torrealba opened Graze Market and Café, a quaint eatery halfway between Lexington and Winchester. Though no longer surrounded by the wild game of his youth (ostrich, venison, zebra), de Villiers continues to bring his ethos of eating close to the source to his restaurant with locally sourced meats from the likes of Colibri Sheep Farm in Georgetown. His food draws heavily from his South African background, with influences of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch and even the American South – but he’d rather talk about his fresh ingredients than his cooking style.

“I feel like we’re cheating, getting to cook with such great stuff,” he said. ss

Tags

by

.