Kevin Tien can lick his elbows — but wait, there’s more. He also has a knack for centrifugal benthic differentials from his time working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He is trained in underwater helicopter crash escape and open water rescue, including using coveralls as a floatation device. He can ice skate backwards.

As a teenager, he ran Halo and Tekken gaming tournaments and used the profits to buy hotel suites for his friends at anime conventions in Dallas. Working briefly for Geico after college, he netted $1 million in savings for the company just three months into the job (thanks to his masters degree in data analytics). He has been celebrated by, of all places, the U.S. State Department for his leadership and innovation. He is fluent in Taylor Swift lyrics. And he can karaoke and twerk with the best of them, often simultaneously.

“I’m a normal guy,” he said, “but I guess I have a weird life.”

In short, he can do anything. What he chooses to do is be a chef, shining his Việt heritage and Cajun upbringing through a fine-dining lens in his adopted home of Washington, D.C.. When Superman picks up a day job as a reporter for the Daily Planet, you should read his articles. When Tien decides to channel his broad talents into a dish, you should eat it.

“Kevin is trying to create goodness out of madness,” said José Andrés, Tien’s mentor from the latter’s days as a ceviche chef at Andres’ restaurant Oyamel. “He’s a very likable person. His smile. His eyes. You feel at ease with him very quickly.”

Moon Rabbit’s Bún Kèn, a dessert with Vietnamese fish sauce (from the island of Phú Quốc) containing an avocado sorbet, and a sponge cake with aromatics of curry.

After Tien broke up a fight at his debut restaurant, Himitsu, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was a regular there, sent him a letter: “Thank you for your commitment to your community’s safety,” she wrote. “You and your staff are exemplary examples of citizens watching out for the well-being of others.”

When Tien cooked for Vice President Kamala Harris along with chef Tim Ma, with whom he co-founded Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate, she sang their praises effusively, finishing with succinct gratitude: “I thank you for your leadership.”

Besides fundraisers and night markets, Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate has paid for funeral-related expenses for an Asian delivery man in New York who was killed in a hate crime, paid for a door replacement of a vandalized Japanese restaurant in Washington state, paid bills for an Asian restaurant worker in D.C. who was hospitalized by an assault, paid medical expenses for an Asian delivery worker in San Francisco, and much more. They even replaced vandalized equipment and scrubbed graffiti at an Asian-run nail salon in Salt Lake City. One Cambodian-Taiwanese restaurant in D.C. got money three times to replace smashed windows.

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Payments—perhaps surprisingly small but transformative nonetheless—have ranged from $300 to $1,800 with an average of roughly $500, according to Pamela Yee, the organization’s executive director.

While giving Tien a certificate of congressional recognition, Judy Chu, the California congresswoman representing Monterey Park, where 11 Asian Americans were gunned down last year, said: “Chef Kevin has garnered national attention and accolades from all corners of the United States.”

Well, almost all corners.

A four-time semifinalist or finalist for a James Beard Award, Tien has never won—despite the James Beard Foundation depending on Tien as a judge and as a cook for galas and other special events, including fundraisers.

Similarly, Erika Moritsugu, AAPI senior liaison at the White House, declined to comment for this article on Tien’s culinary or community talents despite using him for the menu of the White House’s first-ever Lunar New Year celebration last year.

Vietnamese Stuffed Squid (Mực Nhồi Thịt). "This dish is known in central Vietnam (mostly Huế) as a street food and it’s normally stuffed like a Vietnamese fried spring roll with pork, noodles, and wood ear mushrooms," says Tien. "We chose to stuff ours like a Việt Cajun boudin. I was really inspired by an Italian pork-stuffed squid as well."

And although it lifted hopes across America’s 2.2 million Việt hearts when it awarded its coveted stars to restaurants in Vietnam for the first time last year, the revered Michelin Guide still has never awarded a star to a Việt U.S. restaurant.

Such dismissals fit a familiar frustration for Asian Americans, whose food and fashions and music and films and television shows and video games and fads are broadly adored even as their accents, bodies, faces, languages, names, and souls are broadly reviled. Asked to name any— any!—Asian American, 42 percent of Americans in 2021 gave the most-popular answer: “I don’t know.” For many Americans, unless Asian Americans are delivering boba tea, laundry, mani-pedis, massage, spring rolls, sushi, or General Tso’s chicken, they do not exist.

For Tien, this painful paradox peaked in May, when he was unceremoniously fired from his breakthrough restaurant Moon Rabbit, which was an Esquire Best New Restaurant in 2021—during a fundraiser he was putting on to stop AAPI hate at the tail end of Asian American Heritage Month.

“Blood sweat and tears sounds cliche but with Kevin it’s legit,” said Eric Adjepong, who had spent the day filming Tien for his show Cultural Eats. “It wasn’t very surprising how professional he was about it all. To me, that’s probably his hallmark. I commend him for that. Someone else could’ve thrown papers in the air and say ‘Fuck this!’”

The mayor’s office reached out to see if it could offer any help. The vice president’s office reached out (Tien had just cooked for her at her home for the third time earlier that week). And Việt members of Virginia’s state legislature showed up to protest.

For his part, Tien put on a far-too-practiced, far-too-necessary smile that evening — but later that night, nudged by tequila, he sighed on the shimmering brink of tears and said plainly: “I’ve been mistreated my whole life.”

An 11 year-old Kevin Tien with his sister (center) and their mother (left.)

When he cried as a baby, his gangster father would threaten to shoot him, brandishing a gun and all. One of Tien’s first memories is sitting on that father’s lap as he was fed beer to get sleepy. When that father went to jail, Tien was raised by extended family who loathed him so much that, when he was 8, they went on a ski vacation without him, leaving him home alone. He spent that time as he often did: chasing chickens in the backyard or staring at the ceiling, dreaming of a different life, if not a better one.

At 12, finally sick of him, his family gave him and his younger sister $10 spending money for a two-day bus ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans to reconnect with their mother. The unaccompanied children survived only thanks to a shared apple offered by an Arab immigrant woman and a McDonalds meal given by the bus driver.

Tien has had terrible luck in life, starting college in New Orleans only weeks before Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and then graduating with a finance degree on the cusp of the financial crisis.

But now he has returned after the humiliation in May to reopen his restaurant, Moon Rabbit, on his own terms in a new location with a new menu. He is so personally invested that his debit card was rejected recently during a simple grocery store run.

His goal, he told me as he served me an exclusive preview of his menu, is audacious. Sure, he wants America’s first Việt Michelin star, but more than that: “I want people to say, man, I had a Vietnamese meal but it’s not like any Vietnamese food you’ve ever had in your life. It’s completely different. I didn’t think Vietnamese food could be like this.”

Moon Rabbit’s “Fucked-up Gnocchi” (Bánh Canh Cua).

Consider what began as a riff in Tien’s notebook for “fucked-up gnocchi”: bánh canh cua (crab and shrimp tapioca noodle soup) reimagined as a pasta dish, centered on gnocchi made from potato starch. Its sauce is tomato-based, nduja-infused, and crab fat-lifted, then accented with garlic and lemongrass and garnished with herbs and shrimp-head oil.

In his bò lá lốt, grilled ground wagyu’s lemongrass is tactfully less upfront than in its often-clumsy, blaring use by White chefs and instead drifts onto the palate only after permeating collard greens (instead of traditional betel leaves), labneh, and pineapple that has been compressed with fish sauce.

A transcendent savory dessert inspired by bún kèn (fish curry) from the island of Phú Quốc uses coconut jelly and avocado sorbet to mimic coconut milk, then adds soursop yogurt and fish sauce caramel, all atop a sponge cake of coriander, curry leaves, galangal, ginger, jalapeño, lime leaf, three types of peppercorns, and turmeric. Every bite is a revelation.

Being inventive with Asian ingredients and techniques isn’t new. David Chang has been banging that drum for 20 years. But nobody ever went to Chang for authenticity (incidentally, Tien worked at Momofuku CCDC under Chang in the throes of Chang’s bipolar bullying, giving him a kind of anti-mentor of who he never wanted to be). Unlike Chang, Tien has figured out how to be creative about authenticity, dislodging it from the past and swinging it hard, transforming it from an anchor to an oar. He is giving authenticity a future.

“His food is so moving,” said Qui Tran, a prominent Việt chef in St. Louis —of Mai Lee and Nudo House—who looks up to Tien. “It looks like Le Bernardin but tastes like grandma’s cooking. And everything makes sense even though it’s so surprising. It’s motivating, to be honest. It’s not something I’ve experienced in Vietnamese restaurants before.”

Thai Dang, of HaiSous in Chicago, where Tien made sure to eat when he was in town for the James Beard Awards, agreed: “He’s really repping for our culture. And it’s progressive, refined. I respect what Kevin does in highlighting our dishes that way. Growing up, I didn’t have a Vietnamese chef to look up to. We need more chefs like him.”

The Moon Rabbit team. Left to right, seated Minsu Son (Sous Chef), Judy Beltrano (Chef de Cuisine and partner), Nicole Patierno (Assistant General Manager), Susan Bae (Pastry Chef and partner). From left to right, standing: Thi Nguyen (Bar Director) Chef Kevin Tien (Executive Chef, Owner & Partner).

There is a Việt concept called thương. It describes a very attentive kind of love or a very loving kind of attention, the sort of sacrifice in togetherness that feels more like giving than losing. If you’re not sure how to pronounce thương, there’s a much easier way to say it in America: Kevin Tien.

At 36, he is part of a generation of Vietnamese-Americans who are the first in almost a century never to have been refugees and who aren’t displaced. After decades of rejection, he has finally found acceptance—of himself, of his culture, of his purpose, and of his mission.

I asked him for his biggest regret in his tempest-tossed life and he knew immediately. “I had the best po’ boy ever: the surf & turf at Darrell’s in Lake Charles,” he said. “I got the small. But I should’ve gotten the large.”

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