Chef Hue-Chan Karels doesn’t consider cooking her vocation as much as a part of her DNA. Her earliest memories involve cooking with her grandmother in Vietnam and making pastries as a teen for her parents’ French restaurant outside East Lansing, Mich. A degree in Organizational Development from Michigan State University launched a career helping entities like the Food and Drug Administration grow while maintaining regulatory compliance, but a lingering passion to help her home country led to international entrepreneurship through her company Viet Link. Karels and her husband, John, began coming to Santa Fe long before they made it their permanent home in 2014. Since arriving, a side project called Open Kitchen Hue-Chan started while living in Washington DC has evolved into Santa Fe’s Alkeme at Open Kitchen, which was a semifinalist for Best New Restaurant in America by the James Beard Foundation in 2024. There, she and executive chef Erica Tai deliver a menu that pays homage to the heritage cuisines of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands using ancestral recipes, stories, and memories. SFR caught up with Karels as she prepares for another trip to Vietnam, but this one carries special significance. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Dave Cathey)
Where were you and what was your life like 50 years ago this month?
I was living the life of a naïve kid with my brothers in a privileged home environment, but things definitely changed overnight. On April 23rd, we left the country. After some finessing from my mother who had worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist way back before she had her own newspaper. That got us visas out of the country. I still remember when President Nguyen Van Thieu went on the air to resign. Up to that point, the whole country—well, my parents and their network—were still holding out hope that something magical was going to happen. That the Americans were going to maybe interject more support and rescue the country from the inevitable. But when we went to my grandparents' house, I still remember on April 21st, we listened to the news of the president's resignation, and we knew it was over. I think it kind of gave permission to the Vietnamese people, and to my parents, to go. So we packed tiny, yellow shoulder bags and left for the airport. Per my mother's instruction and foresight, we packed very memorable items—precious photos and things like that.
I had my last meal, bánh cuốn (steamed rice crêpes), at this cart in the city near the market when we went to say goodbye to my grandparents. Then we made our way to the airport and waited hours to board a military aircraft. I think we were in the first wave out of Vietnam.
Where will you be this April 23?
I will be back in Saigon eating bánh cuốn! We will revel in all that has transpired from the time I was nine to now 59. I will be with my husband and family on my father's side who never left. It will be very different. When we left, I felt the energy but more of an adventurous energy. Not the anxious energy my parents and grandparents must have felt. I can only imagine the emotions that will surface. A whole lifetime has passed—all the memories, experiences, challenges and hardships. All the maneuvering, adapting, navigating we’ve done since then to not only survive but thrive. I had to just trust my instincts at times, trust in the process of the world that it's going to be a fine if you just keep flowing with it.
The Vietnamese diaspora, the origin story of the Vietnamese, is about resilience. That we will be okay, that we will survive, that we will reimagine, that we will come up again. No matter how difficult our lives can be and how challenging life gets, our experience proves the notion that we will come up and come through.
Your trip home is also to film a documentary. What can you tell us about that?
So the documentary has morphed, but I think it has circled back to a theme of “Where do we find home?” Fifty years ago, home was a place we had to flee from. Home was a physical country, and then we became stateless. That was what was on my green card. I was stateless because I had no country. For many years, home was something we were missing, and we strived to have back. My documentary speaks to the fact that home is where we are, where we feed ourselves and the food that we eat. Home is where we create the feeling that bonds us and the clearest and most prominent and most immediate way is through food and foodways. The documentary is focusing on foodways and how foodways have the most basic bond whether you can speak the language or not.
The language itself doesn't create a sense of identity. We create a sense of identity and a bonding to one another through foodways. Whether I have a croissant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or in Paris, France, or far off in Mexico City, there is this thread of ingredients and the effort that go into creating it that binds us. So I think that the more that I'm researching this short documentary, it's about coming home through food. Whether you physically can go back to Vietnam, or not, you are coming home through foodways that we keep, that we pass down through generations.
In speaking with other Vietnamese who are sharing their own homecoming journeys and their own ways of reclaiming their home, reclaiming their identities, whether they were born in Vietnam, like myself, or they were born outside of Vietnam, for so many of them, the resonance of being Vietnamese absolutely begins through food.
