Hao Tran did not arrive in the food world through a culinary school or a restaurant kitchen. She came through grief and an empty house and a therapist who wasn’t helping. After her daughters left for college, she took the money she had been spending on therapy and spent it on food instead — specifically on the dishes she grew up eating, the ones her grandmother and aunt had made, the ones she had been carrying around in her memory for years without anywhere to put them.
She started making dumplings. Then she started showing up at pop-ups. Then she did another. And another. Three hundred and fifty of them over two years, schlepping equipment out of her car across North Texas, building a following one bowl at a time, all while teaching high school chemistry by day and running her own kitchen by night.
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