Follow Chef Christine Ha's journey into the restaurant business.
Christine Huyen Tran Ha is a Houston-based chef, author, public speaker, and restaurateur who claims multiple James Beard nominations. Not even halfway through her fifth decade, she has already accomplished more than most people twice her age. A five-minute conversation with the energetic Houstonian by way of Southern California will make it clear that Ha is just getting started.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in creative fiction and nonfiction from the University of Houston. And while she’s best known as a chef, she is putting both degrees to use, with the former as a business owner and the latter as an author.
Rediscovering Mom’s Recipes Years After Her Death
Although Ha was not born blind, she was diagnosed with Neuromyelitis Optica in her mid-twenties. That was a decade after losing her mother to lung cancer. Although both of her parents worked, Ha’s mom cooked at home. Those recipes were the catalyst for her diving headfirst into the kitchen. That sounds quite simple, and it might have been if the recipes were ever written down.
Recreating those recipes became a challenge, which she dove into head first. She did not cook while her mom was alive. In fact, she didn’t get started cooking until her sophomore year of college. While that was out of necessity, she also missed her mom’s Vietnamese cooking. By then, she had already visited Vietnam–and she’s visited close to a dozen times over the past quarter-century.
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There’s no simple answer for how long it took Ha to recreate her mom’s recipes. She recalls “lots of trial and error.” The process was straightforward reverse engineering; some recipes only took a few tries. She would smell test at different stages of preparation and then taste at the end.
Losing her vision did not slow her down in life or the kitchen.
“I learned [about cooking] after losing my vision–[it] is a very sensual or multi-sensory activity,” says Ha. “You can do it without the sense of sight. I rely on my remaining four senses to cook.”
Ha uses her fingers to measure diced vegetables, smells garlic at different stages on the skillet, and tastes food to determine whether more salt or acid is needed to achieve the right balance. She also relies on assistive technology, especially her phone. That’s where she stores all of her recipes, using a screen reader when needed. In addition, Ha uses various smartphone apps to track which ingredients she has in her fridge and pantry. To avoid water overflow, she uses a liquid level indication.
‘MasterChef’ and the Blind Goat
It takes confidence to open three restaurants in one of America’s most revered cities for Vietnamese food—especially without a formal background in hospitality. Ha’s self-deprecation reveals itself when she speaks about her mom’s recipe for pho bo (beef noodle soup and Vietnam’s national dish).
“It’s still beyond me to this day,” she says. But anyone who has ever driven along Bellaire Boulevard in the Little Saigon subsection of Houston’s Chinatown knows that pho fatigue can be a real thing in a city with the third-largest Vietnamese population in the United States.
By the early 2010s, Ha decided to put her years of learning mom’s recipes to the test. She attended the nearest MasterChef open audition call in Austin. There, she made the braised pork belly, which you can find on the Xin Chao menu. Months passed until she was invited back to the city of her birth to audition before three judges, where she made a caramelized catfish in a clay pot.
“I remember before going to L.A., I practiced the catfish dish so many times at home, my husband got sick of eating that dish,” she laughs.
In late 2012, she was announced the winner of MasterChef and went home with the grand prize of $250,000. Eight months later, she released her first cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food.
While Ha dedicated much of her adult life to learning traditional Vietnamese recipes, those were not what she had in mind for her first business venture. Ha and her husband, John, opened The Blind Goat at the Bravery Chef Hall in 2019 (the goat being a reference to her zodiac symbol), before moving to Houston’s Spring Branch neighborhood this year.
While Vietnamese is the biggest influence on her menu, she does not believe she can do traditional Vietnamese any better than her mom or other chefs who grew up in Vietnam. Instead, she knew she needed to understand the old recipes to create her own takes.
The first two small plate items on the current menu greatly describe her approach. The Bánh Mì Board is a deconstructed bánh mì sandwich, while the bone marrow pho comes with toasted baguette slices. Another noodle dish is the rich, buttery crawfish noodle dish topped with lemon zest. That one uses spaghetti. Crawfish is common throughout the Gulf Coast area and is a hallmark of Viet-Cajun cuisine. The Whole Roasted Turmeric Fish is a nod to her late father.
James Beard Nominations and Her First Sit-down Restaurant
In 2020, she opened a sit-down restaurant in Houston’s Sixth Ward neighborhood with fellow second-generation Vietnamese chef Tony Nguyen. The restaurant’s name, Xin Chao, means “hello” in Vietnamese. Like Ha, Nguyen experiments with his mom’s traditional Vietnamese recipes. Both Ha and Nguyen were James Beard Outstanding Chef Award finalists in 2022 and semi-finalists in 2023.
While there is some overlap between The Blind Goat and Xin Chao menus, most items are different. When asked what she recommends for first-time Xin Chao visitors, she singles out the braised pork and crispy rice, the dish that secured her win on MasterChef.
Ha also recommends the “Nguyen-er Nguyen-er Chicken Dinner,” which makes sense if you know how to pronounce the Vietnamese surname.
Looking Ahead
Ha is working on opening Stuffed Belly in Houston, a drive-thru sandwich concept that promises to be her quirkiest concept to date. It will be a nod to her favorite sandwiches from childhood. When asked to elaborate, Ha points out a tuna salad sandwich she enjoyed as a child during road trips with her parents. Of the creative sandwiches diners can look forward to trying, Ha is most excited about the “pho-strami,” a take on a pastrami sandwich with pho spices that will be a limited special.
As far as expanding her restaurant empire outside of Houston, Ha says she has considered opening a location in Vietnam. She’s been there nearly a dozen times between 1997 and 2022 and speaks what she calls “conversational Vietnamese.” Her Ted Talks have taken her around the world, and she and her husband always dedicate time to meeting other chefs and checking out the local food scene for menu inspiration. When asked which items she hopes to introduce on future menu iterations, she talks about duck eggs, fondly remembering how her mom knew to pick the right ones with more yolk and less fetus.
Ha has also been working on her writing. She is in the process of penning a memoir and hopes to one day publish another cookbook. You can connect with and follow Ha’s work on Twitter and Instagram: @theblindcook.