If you’re a longtime restaurant lover in the Twin Cities, you may think you know Rainbow owner Tammy Wong. After all, since 1987, she’s been harnessing fire and charming guests at her Eat Street Chinese anchor, which just reopened after a lengthy pandemic-driven closure. She’s also a staple of the Minneapolis Farmers Market on Lyndale with her famous egg rolls. But did you know that over the last decade, she’s been reinventing her food, inspired by her deep family history?
I thought I knew Tammy Wong, but I only came to understand the extent of her reinvention after chatting with her over the course of a month. Hearing all she’s been up to, I suggested: “I think you have been turning yourself into the Alice Waters of Chinese food in America, but no one knows it. Does that sound about right?”
“Alice Waters?” echoed Wong, turning from her roaring stove fitted with woks the size of washtubs and woks the size of dinner plates and woks of ordinary size, all clustered beneath a vent hood with an updraft as powerful as a summer storm. She tipped curried cauliflower onto a plate, shook her head, and replied, “I wish. Alice Waters has a team. I am all alone.”
True enough. Alice Waters, the pioneer of farm-to-table and California cuisine, does have a team, and when I popped in just before Rainbow reopened, Tammy Wong was literally alone. This was in part because Pancho and Pepe, cooks who have been at her side since the 1990s, were just walking out as I was walking in. The three had spent the morning around a steel table, rolling about a million egg rolls, just as they have on, let’s guesstimate, 10,000 other days? One measure of the worth of chefs is the loyalty they inspire in their cooks—Francisco “Pancho” Penafort and Jose “Pepe” Cantoran are loyal as the sky.
Watching Wong conduct her custom inferno of flame, her soft chestnut hair looped back in a ponytail, I was suddenly mindful of how chefs have, over the years, confessed their envy of this cooking line Wong built for herself when she moved her restaurant across the street from the old strip mall location in 1997. But it took this moment of blackening cauliflower for me to truly understand. Flame like a blacksmith’s forge, heat like a volcano. A serious tool for a serious chef.
Serious like Alice Waters? Waters came up because Wong had been telling me about her recent food evolutions. Did I know she had invented a way to make a food-coloring-free sweet-and-sour sauce? I did not. She starts with squash and carrot puree, then builds up flavors that are perfectly sweet and sour, tangy and bright, and offer the eye-catching glamour-glaze of sweet-and-sour sauce but with the health-giving power of vegetables.
Wong also told me about the young daylilies and herb sprouts she’d foraged from her community garden plot. Young daylilies taste like their botanical cousin the onion, explained Wong, and vegetable gardening is now such a passion of hers that she knows exactly what is coming up where in her garden, even when every plant still has those baby cotyledon leaves.
She also shared how on Saturdays and Sundays, she arrives at the Minneapolis Farmers Market on Lyndale at dawn to run her Rainbow booth, but before she sets up, she prowls the aisles to buy the best of the best to save for her restaurant service. Then she sets out her strawberry-rhubarb lemonade and famous egg rolls.
Why are these egg rolls so famous? Because they’re so very fat and healthy and counterintuitively tender. Cut one crosswise to find what looks like a whole head’s worth of minutely shredded cabbage, studded with the finest julienne of carrots, a little bit of chicken (so they’re perfect for her kosher and halal customers), and enough glass noodles to hold it all together. Wong has developed a multistep process, using a special wrapper, that allows her to pack her egg rolls with cabbage but then cook them so that oil can’t enter the tightly folded vegetable chamber. This allows her to “melt” the cabbage using exterior heat. That’s why they’re so tender. That’s why you want to gobble them up like candy.
Wong ruefully told me tales of other chefs in town who want to know what machine she uses for her egg rolls and dumplings—no machines. What she does machines can’t do. What she does takes a lifetime, a lifetime with a surprising mid-career refocus.
Do you know the Wong family story? Serious eaters in the Twin Cities should know it. It started in China, in Guangdong Province, then called Canton, where Tammy Wong’s ancestors had been living and eating for many generations. The upheavals of World War II, the Communist Party’s Great Leap Forward, and famine led Wong’s family to flee to Saigon, later called Ho Chi Minh City. That’s where Tammy Wong was born in 1963, and where her grandmother began selling vegetables and tamarind candies at the local market, with young Tammy helping roll and package the candy. In 1975, soon after America’s exit from Vietnam, the Wong family made it to a refugee camp in Hong Kong.
The promise of Minnesota peeked over the horizon when Walter Mondale visited her refugee camp in 1979. Little could the then vice president have known that one of the child refugees, who was working her childhood away assembling Hot Wheels cars in a factory she reached by bus, would someday be his favorite chef, make his annual birthday treat of Chilean sea bass with black bean sauce, and cook for him at his 90th birthday party, where she’d get her picture taken with him and America’s beloved one-term president Jimmy Carter. But that’s jumping ahead.
First, in 1979, the Wong family hopped to New York City, where Tammy Wong scored a new childhood factory job sewing and was delighted to find herself smack-dab in a new world of fellow Chinese teenagers. “I had a lot of friends. We’d go to Canal Jean, sift through the bins outside looking for just the right clothes, and grab something to eat,” she recalled. “Everyone [on the factory floor] would talk about, This place in Chinatown has the best bao; that one has the best particular sort of noodles. It was a very foodie culture, though we didn’t have that word.”
The family relocated to Minneapolis in 1983, finding a house not 10 blocks from Rainbow today, from which the nine Wong siblings fanned out, finding whatever jobs they could, many in food. Tammy Wong enrolled in Southwest High School and got jobs in various local Chinese restaurants, like Kowloon, Village Wok, and Great Wall, where she drew attention as she skillfully spoke English with the customers while writing Chinese on restaurant tickets for the chefs. After a few years, Wong’s father had the idea that the whole family should stop juggling jobs at other businesses and pull together to work at a single-family restaurant. In 1987, Rainbow opened in the strip mall across the street from its current location. Because she was responsible, English-proficient, and the eldest daughter, Tammy Wong dealt with all the restaurant paperwork and started to teach herself to cook at restaurant scale.
She became a very good restaurant chef in short order. In the 1990s, Rainbow was the leading, most important Chinese restaurant in town—with lines of customers to prove it. Diners watched the Wong siblings hustle and cook and transform Minnesota food culture, as they still do today. Daisy Wong is part of the group running the two Shuang Hur markets, with their phenomenal Chinese barbecue counters. Nina Wong is the force behind Chin Dian, the Chinese-Indian spot that reflects her culinary interests after she married a man from the Indian subcontinent. Tracy Wong runs My Huong Kitchen, a delightful Vietnamese spot across from Rainbow that just completed a big dining room renovation. The other Wong siblings return to Rainbow to help when things become hectic, or glorious—like when Wong cooked a $500-a-plate dinner inside Mia celebrating its Chinese bronzes.
“Rolling those tamarind candies with my grandmother. The vegetables. The farmers. Growing. Selling-vegetables lady. This is me, too.”—Tammy Wong
Yet one day, after 20 years at the top of Rainbow, everything suddenly changed for Wong. She recalls it as a moment rooted in Saigon and her grandmother, who the Chinese expat community called something that roughly translates to “selling-vegetables lady.” Wong had been so busy cooking and running her restaurant, she didn’t have time to think about vegetables beyond the delivery truck at the back door. “When the Minneapolis Farmers Market first reached out to me, they wanted me to teach a class,” she recalled. “I thought, OK, that’s good marketing. But when I got down there, I had this feeling: Rolling those tamarind candies with my grandmother. The vegetables. The farmers. Growing. Selling-vegetables lady. This is me, too.”
Inspired, she took over an abandoned double plot in a Whittier community garden and started growing some of her own vegetables and herbs. It gave her such a sense of connection to the other growers, to the rhythm of market and food itself, that in 2014, she debuted her own Rainbow farmers’ market booth. The “it girl” chef of Minneapolis Chinese food of the 1990s also started reverse engineering her menu to make it healthier, more grower-oriented, more what she saw in her chef mind’s eye, the food her market-oriented, vegetable-focused grandmother would love.
The famous Rainbow Szechuan wontons, essentially a Tammy Wong reinvention of her family’s Guangdong-style wontons in a Szechuan red chili oil, got pared down and became a little more complex with fermented black beans. Turnip cakes were always handmade, with hand-grated turnips, but now they’re served with a bright tangle of farmers’ market green onions and eggs.
When Wong handed me chopsticks for that cauliflower—that charred, blistered, curried, magnificent cauliflower—she remarked that I really needed to come back in the cauliflower season to get all the purple and yellow heirloom varieties together on one plate. “All the vegan and gluten-free people, they come for miles for my cauliflower,” explained Wong. “And the brussels sprouts. We sell so many brussels sprouts.”
In the end, she said, “when I think about my whole life as a chef, it’s so many things—I don’t know how you can put all of it in a story. The first thing I learned to cook was boiled water. This sounds easy. This wasn’t easy in Vietnam. You had to cut firewood into kindling, use a ceramic burner. Don’t cut yourself or burn yourself. You’re 6 years old. Then I cook for everybody: I cook for Mr. Mondale, Josh Hartnett, and Jane Goodall.” (Goodall and Hartnett both were crazy for Wong’s mixed vegetables with tofu and black bean sauce.)
“For some people, I’m just the farmers’ market lady with the lemonade who makes their kids happy so they can shop. For some people, they’ve been coming to me their whole lives, but they don’t even know I plant all the flower boxes outside so people have a good feeling coming in the doors. You say Alice Waters. What’s the difference between me and Alice Waters? I think she has better publicity. She has a better story.”
Alice Waters might have better publicity, but I’ll offer this: In no world or way does she have a better story.