Nokmaniphone Sayavong started her business, Nok’s Kitchen, during the worst of times—the Covid pandemic—and in a state that often treats small businesses with the delicacy of a cat torturing a mouse. Yet she has found a way to thrive. Her minor miracle, located in a strip mall at the edge of Westminster, California’s Little Saigon, epitomizes the durability of the California dream, which is nowhere more alive than in the state’s innovative food culture.
Like many successful Golden State entrepreneurs, Sayavong rose from obscurity. After arriving in 2016 from the Laotian capital of Vientiane, Nok, as she is known by family and friends, studied computer science for two years at the University of California–Irvine. But Nok, 36, had also learned to cook for her younger siblings and, later, for her husband, Billie, 39, an American citizen and computer consultant.
Billie, brought up in California but of Laotian descent, loved the sausages of his ancestral home, pungent with lemongrass and garlic and made with pork shoulders, but he couldn’t buy them, even in the heavily Asian parts of north Orange County. Nok learned to make them at home. Then, amid the Covid lockdowns, Nok had a brainstorm. If her husband yearned for a taste of home, so might the estimated 12,000 Laotians residing in Los Angeles and San Diego. (California accounts for half of the nation’s ten largest Laotian population centers.)
“Covid came, and people were eating at home,” she recalls. “We were afraid but...
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