Hmong influencer opens Fresno restaurant; her online fans now in line for food
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- NyabTee Kitchen opened June 6 in Fresno; online followers asked for year-round food.
For years, Tee Her and his wife, Porxoua Moua, have been regulars at the Fresno Hmong New Year. They run a booth where they sell Hmong food, spice packets and sauces, and have served thousands of people within a single day.
Their success at the annual celebrations is what prompted Moua to become an influencer. Online, she goes by NyabTee, which means “Tee’s wife” or “daughter-in-law through Tee.”
NyabTee Live has 124,700 followers on TikTok and an additional 70,000 on Facebook, as well as an additional page, NyabTee Cooking, which has 1,700 followers. There, Moua sells the spice packets and the sauces, and receives hundreds of comments and messages asking how to buy prepared food year-round.
Now, Moua and Her have opened their first restaurant, NyabTee Kitchen, at 635 N. First St. in Fresno.
“It’s gotten to the point where we can’t do this at home,” Her said.
There’s nowhere to sit inside the restaurant, but outside there’s a couple of small wooden picnic tables with large red umbrellas for shade. Pictures of the food the restaurant serves line the outside wall as customers walk in, but Her said the menu does change based on feedback from customers.
“Practice what you preach. Eat what you cook,” Her said. “If I don’t like it, I don’t cook it for someone else.”
Hmong are an ethnic minority from East and Southeast Asia. As such, while there are some foods that are uniquely Hmong, the cuisine shares a lot with surrounding cultures, like Laotian, Cambodian, Indian and Vietnamese food.
Her and Moua travel often, and Her said they bring back ideas of what to serve when they come home.
“If you want good food, we’ll have something for you. That’s our goal,” Her said.
Her said he and Moua worked closely with both the city and the county before they opened the restaurant. Neither of them have owned a restaurant before, and Her was grateful for the support they received, both from the agencies and the community.
On the first day they opened, June 6, Her and Moua thought they had enough food on hand to supply the restaurant for a week. They sold out in two days, and now they have suppliers coming every morning to make sure the restaurant doesn’t run out again.
“I’m guessing that we’re doing it right,” Her said.
To return that support, Her and Moua work with people to meet the larger community needs. The restaurant normally opens at 10 a.m., but they’ve started opening a little earlier to help out nurses getting off of a 12-hour overnight shift at the nearby hospital. The nurses will stop by the restaurant on the way home, pick up the food and have it on hand for their families to eat during the day.
Moua finds it fulfilling to share her food and see customers enjoy it. While about half of their sales come from people who see the food on social media and come in to try it, the other half is from the community around them, and Moua knows them and greets them with a hug.
Opening earlier also helps people who travel to come try their food. Her said they’ve had customers come in from as far away as Los Angeles, and they’ll stop by the restaurant while they’ve got business in Fresno.
They’re also working on improving their ability to fill online orders. Her said that he and Moua are working to get a Processed Food Registration permit, which will allow them to better ship their sauce and spice packets to people out of state.
That’s a learning process as well, but Her has already learned and developed a lot of new skills as part of owning the business, and isn’t afraid to learn more.
“You don’t need to know everything,” Her said. “You just need to be able to open up.”
