Khue’s Kitchen is the Star Tribune’s 2025 Best New Restaurant

Khue’s Kitchen sits in a quiet industrial pocket of St. Paul, right off a busy stretch of University Avenue. It’s in a dark gray building, and easy to miss. Glimmering string lights on the patio are the only hint that there might be a restaurant here, before you climb some slippery, metal stairs.

Inside, the dining room hums with youthful chaos and scrappy energy. The hastily put together dining room, adjacent to a shared-use commercial kitchen, has all the industrial charm of a brewery loading dock. But the food coming out of the kitchen is electrifying. It hits you like a shovel.

At only 25 years old, chef/owner Eric Pham cooks like he’s got something to prove. The menu is a highlight reel from his life thus far: the Vietnamese flavors he grew up with, the family restaurant that shaped him, the pro kitchen that humbled him, and the fire that almost ended everything.

The restaurant is a tribute to his mother, Khue. “She’s my North Star, my culinary inspiration,” says Pham, “She is everything I strive to be as a cook and as a chef.”

Pham grew up inside Quang Restaurant, the Vietnamese institution on Minneapolis’ Eat Street founded by his grandmother in 1989, and currently run by his mom, Khue (pronounced “kway”). “I started working there when I was 12,” he said. “Busing tables was where I landed the most.”

He had a passing interest in food, doing things like watching cooking videos in high school and tinkering with recipes. But like all the kids in his family, he was expected to go to college. While studying to be an accountant, bored in a macroeconomics class, he googled “best chef in the Twin Cities,” and Gavin Kaysen’s name popped up. Eric got himself a trial at Kaysen’s upscale Minneapolis restaurant Spoon and Stable. “I completely bombed,” he remembers. He went back in, and kept at it until they offered him a job.

When he told his parents he was dropping out of college to pursue cooking, his mom burst out crying. “She said it was the worst day of her life,” Eric says. She worked her whole life to spare her children the brutal grind of restaurant work. His dad was more easygoing: “I knew you were going to do something wild.”

There was just one problem: His mom refused to share her recipes. For months, mother and son didn’t speak. His dad, Cuong Pham, sent Eric to learn Vietnamese cooking from his uncle in Texas, where he pieced together flavor memories from his childhood. Even though they weren’t on speaking terms at the time, Eric named his business after his mom: Khue’s Kitchen.

The ghost kitchen nearly broke him. He spent days waiting for DoorDash orders that sometimes never came. But he perfected his fried chicken sandwich, and after the Star Tribune crowned it one of their “5 best things we ate” in the fall of 2022, there was a line out the door, with the sandwich reaching cult status.

By 2023, he had transitioned to a residency at the natural wine bar Bar Brava. When the Star Tribune reached out to him about a Mother’s Day feature that spring, father and son orchestrated an intervention disguised as an interview. “It was so raw,” Eric says about how he reconciled with his mom. “But it brought us back together.”

Eric secured a restaurant space in St. Paul, the former Ngon Bistro, and spent months prepping. Friends and family night was two weeks away. Then came the midnight phone call: “I think your building’s on fire.”

At 3 a.m., sitting on the curb watching his dream burn, Eric asked his father what to do. The answer was simple: “I need you to get back up.” The next day, they were looking at new spaces.

Two weeks later, Kaysen texted: Let’s talk. The conversation led to a pop-up at Spoon and Stable, which led to a guy who knew a guy, which led to the building Eric occupies today.

“Vietnamese food is more than just pho and spring rolls,” Eric explains. “There’s a plethora of recipes and knowledge out there that I want to share with people.”

Eric’s no fan of the term “modernized” to describe his food. “I’m not changing traditional dishes, I’m just serving my mom’s chicken salad.” When Vietnamese guests come in and say, “Dude, we eat this at home,” he takes it as the highest compliment. “Yes, I plate them a little nicer in some ways and do a couple techniques differently. But the soul is there.”

The menu is an autobiographical take from a third generation, Vietnamese-American 25-year-old Gen Z kid who grew up in Minnesota restaurants, with some of his favorite dishes from different stages of his life. Not everything lands perfectly; the pork chop just feels like a pork chop. But when Eric hits — and he hits often — the food carries the weight of real conviction.

The standout is still that fried chicken sandwich with chili crunch from the ghost kitchen days. An engineering marvel, it’s loud, messy, gnarled, crispy, deeply seasoned and unapologetic. It comes with wet wipes for a reason. When asked how this connects to his past, he simply answered: “KFC and Popeyes.”

Cream cheese wontons have been part of Eric’s life forever. “When I was born, Quang had already been open for 10 years, so cream cheese wontons were just always there.” He stuffs them as full as possible. “I understand it’s not authentic Vietnamese food. But that’s a Minnesota food. They are authentic to me.”

The sleeper hit is the jicama ribs: a mindbending vegan dish with layers of marinated tofu and fried jicama that brilliantly mimic the taste and texture of pork ribs. He learned it from an auntie, Duyen Kim Nguyen at Thanh Luong Vegetarian in Minnetonka, who learned the recipe from Buddhist monks. Eric added his own twist: grilling and glazing them until they taste like summer barbecue.

“My life is a group project,” Eric jokes. “Everyone’s signing their name at some point.”

The food at Khue’s is more ambitious and complex than it lets on. It’s vibrant, playful and slightly mischievous. You can taste the brave recklessness of his leap of faith, the discipline of his training, the comfort of home and the swagger of a 25-year-old realizing that he might actually be good at this.

At Khue’s Kitchen, his father is a presence: he works the grill, he fixes problems, he makes sure the ship is tight even when he claims he’s “retired.” He works the dining room in street clothes, radiating gentle authority.

There’s something distinctly Gen Z about dining at Khue’s Kitchen — servers who’ll chime in about your favorite TV show, a chef who insists his team doesn’t take itself too seriously even while taking the food dead seriously.

What Eric is building now, in a hard-to-find dining room off University Avenue, feels less like a comeback and more like proof: that the food was always going to find its way out, no matter what tried to stop it.