FEATURES | NEW MEXICO
She Left Saigon at Nine. Fifty Years Later, She's Still Cooking Her Way Home.
At Alkemē in Santa Fe, Hue-Chan Karels cooks the food she carried from Saigon, and lets it keep moving.
By Mei Chen | Photos by Tira Howard
Nov. 13, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Years after her family left Vietnam, Hue-Chan Karels spent a whole day making bouillabaisse with her grandmother in Washington. They took a taxi from her grandmother's Dupont Circle condo to the open-air fish market, then went back to a tiny kitchen, a far cry from the one Karels remembered in Saigon.
Her grandmother made stock from fish bones and leeks, pounded rouille with garlic and saffron, and poached each seafood separately. She has made it the same way ever since, thinking of her grandmother every time. "I think that's where I learned that the process itself is part of the pleasure."
Karels is now the chef-owner of Alkemē, the Santa Fe restaurant she opened in 2023 with executive chef Erica Tai, where Vietnamese heritage cooking is reimagined through memory and a life spent starting over. In its first year, the James Beard Foundation named it a Best New Restaurant semifinalist. But the restaurant is only the latest chapter in a life that has run from Saigon to Michigan to D.C. to New Mexico.
Hue-Chan Karels
She grew up watching her grandmother cook in Saigon. Her grandmother was one of the first female pharmacists in Vietnam, with a degree from the University of Michigan and courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But cooking and entertaining were her passion. Meals at her grandparents' home always felt festive: croissants and bûche de Noël alongside bánh chưng. Baking fascinated her most.
She was nine when her family evacuated Saigon in April 1975. Her mother was seven months pregnant, and her two younger brothers were six and 18 months. By the time they reached Camp Pendleton, she was caring for them. They resettled in Michigan that July. The last meal the family shared before leaving Saigon was bánh cuốn, steamed rice sheets filled with pork and mushrooms. "I was nine years old. I certainly wasn't thinking about what that meal represented or that I would still remember its taste 50 years later. But I did."
In Michigan, the flavors of home were hard to find, and none more than fish sauce. "For Vietnamese people, fish sauce is so much more than a condiment. It is in our food, of course, but it is also somehow in our blood, our minds, and our hearts."
Palm sugar–coconut custard
Baking became her first love. When her parents opened Aux Délices, their Vietnamese-French restaurant in Michigan, in 1982, she offered to make all the desserts. She was still in high school, with no formal training. She turned choux pastry into éclairs. "No matter what else was going on in my life, those éclairs still had to be made."
Hanoi–style grilled pork noodles
Vietnamese coffee
In 1992 she founded VietLink, hoping to help rebuild Vietnam, and the next year she returned with her mother, her first time back since 1975. The work grew, and she spent her 20s bringing Vietnamese officials together with American businesses and investors. When the work ended in 1998, she started over, taking an entry-level document-management job and building a consulting career. She spent nearly 20 years in consulting, traveling almost every week.
The turn toward food came in Santa Fe in 2007, over a meal at Café Pasqual's with her husband, John. "It wasn't only the food. There was something about the communal feeling, watching people gather around the table and the kitchen at work, that made me think, I want to create something like this." It grew into Open Kitchen, opened near D.C. in 2009. "I was too ambitious. I tried to do too much under one roof and invested too much in the build-out." After eight years, it closed.
Karels in the dining room
She and John moved to Santa Fe in 2014, and she finished her last consulting job in 2019. "I just finally brought all of it into the kitchen." She began cooking classes, private dinners, and catering, and that became Open Kitchen Santa Fe. Erica Tai, a Santa Fe Community College culinary graduate, joined her in June 2020, in the middle of COVID, and the two cooked together on a meal service called Cooked & Delivered. In 2023 they opened Alkemē.
At Alkemē, Karels creates the recipes, and she and Tai cook, taste, and refine them together. Braised pork belly is where their two histories meet. "What emerges is often something neither of us would have created alone, and something distinctly Alkemē." The flagship is the turmeric crispy cod with dill, her take on Hanoi's chả cá, fried crisp with dill aioli and a green apple-jicama-fennel slaw. Her bánh xèo is open-faced, with a Vietnamese pesto of mint, Thai basil, and cilantro.
Asked what makes her proudest, she answered with two words: "The people." Karels and Tai lead it together, and their team brings different cultures, languages, and backgrounds to the work. The restaurant uses the Vietnamese expression Quý Khách, which translates roughly to esteemed customer, but Karels says the real meaning is about honoring the guest, that hospitality begins with caring for people. "You can't create generosity in the dining room if it doesn't exist behind the scenes."
Alkemē has never positioned itself as a traditional Vietnamese restaurant, and some guests have told her its bánh xèo isn't authentic. "I don't believe honoring Vietnamese food means reproducing something exactly as I remember it." Displacement changed the meaning of food: the dishes refugees carried preserved the Vietnam they had left, while Vietnam and its food kept evolving. "Honoring Vietnamese heritage doesn't mean we have to freeze it in time." Santa Fe, she says, is part of why the restaurant works. "I don't think Alkemē would be the same restaurant somewhere else."
Caramelized colossal shrimp and braised pork belly
The next chapter is already taking shape: the Vietnam Culinary Escapades, a documentary called Nhà Ta, and a cookbook, A Hundred Ways Home. "For a long time, I think I was looking backward, trying to understand what I had lost when we left Vietnam. Now I'm much more interested in what people have created from what they carried with them." It is the same lesson her grandmother taught her in that tiny kitchen. "Heritage remains alive because it continues to move."
Plating pork noodles
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