Little Miss Ha’s owner, Janice Hudgins, didn’t cook much Vietnamese food before opening her restaurant on Houston’s Northcutt Blvd. in Mount Pleasant.
“My mom lives 20 minutes away and as a Vietnamese mom she just cooks food for us all the time,” Hudgins said. “So it was like, well, why do I have to cook Vietnamese food? Mom makes it even better.”
But after returning to Charleston from Atlanta in 2009, Hudgins began exploring new career opportunities. She worked in sales and real estate before becoming a homemaker after having four children with her husband Johnny.
While researching potential employment opportunities after working as a caregiver for decades, Hudgins began posting photos of meals inspired by Food Network chefs to Facebook. And people (metaphorically) ate it up.
In 2016, at the request of friends and acquaintances, Hudgins began hosting private dinners and catering events and serving her mother’s Vietnamese food.
“It was hard because she doesn’t write down recipes,” Hudgins said. “The only time we really cooked together in the kitchen when I was little was rolling egg rolls. We used to roll egg rolls for a local caterer in Moncks Corner and he ordered hundreds of us from us in a week. So we had an assembly line with Mom making the filling, I rolled the spring rolls, and my brother Ryan, who is now my chef, peeled all the spring roll wrappers. That was his only job because he was only 5 or 6 years old.”
As demand for private dinners increased, Hudgins had to go into the kitchen with her mother and learn how to master her recipes. And she put them in writing.
“It goes by taste, smell and sight. Not according to recipes. So she was trying to teach us how to cook,” Hudgins said. “I still go by recipes, but a lot of it is now intuitive and I can appeal to those senses. But the biggest learning curve was just taking their recipes and putting them into a recipe format.”
A living inspiration inspires a nickname
“Mom is the inspiration for all of us, not just for the restaurant but for how everyone should live,” Hudgins said. “She’s Miss Ha and when I started making her recipes for private events and catering I just called myself Little Miss Ha.”
After trying their hand at private events, the Hudgins family were invited by Michael Shemtov to host the first pop-up dinner series at the original Butcher & Bee at 654 King Street, with Miss Ha doing most of the cooking. The family continued the pop-ups for about a year.
In 2018, Shemtov, a longtime friend of the Hudgins family, approached the couple about renting a booth in the now-closed Workshop area at the King Street Extension. Johnny Hudgins worked with Shemtov to open the former Mellow Mushroom on King Street and three other Mellow Mushrooms in the area. With his restaurant experience and Miss Ha’s recipes, the couple decided to do it.
Little Miss Ha’s booth at the Workshop took off and in 2019 the couple decided to open their own full-fledged restaurant in Mount Pleasant, where they knew many of their customers were based.
Just five weeks after Little Miss Ha opened its doors, the pandemic forced closures across the country. The Hudgins family had to find a way to turn the business around by taking over things like home delivery. Now they’re finally getting back into the normal groove and are hoping to expand the business by offering products like their homemade broths and sauces.
Come to America
Janice Hudgins’ parents immigrated to Moncks Corner from Vietnam in 1979 with their two older brothers. Hudgins and her younger brother Ryan are both first-generation Vietnamese-Americans who were born and raised in Moncks Corner.
Hudgins pointed out that although there isn’t a large Vietnamese community in the Charleston area, her family had the support of other relatives who already lived here, including aunts, uncles, and cousins.
“We used to meet at our house every Saturday and Mom would make a main dish like pho or bún bo huê´,” she recalls. “Then all the aunts brought a specialty that they loved to make.
“As is the case in many Asian cultures, we’re not very verbal in how we express love and care, but the way we show how much we love or care for you is by spending hours working on that special dish that we know you want.”
Supporting family was a big aspect of her life, and that’s still true today. Little Miss Ha is closed on Sundays for family time. During the day, the children can choose to do a family activity, e.g. B. watch a movie on their porch, go to the beach, or just spend a few hours at Barnes & Noble.
Sunday evenings are for family dinners, which can range from six people (Hudgins, her husband, their parents and the children) to 10 or more if their brother or friends drop by. “It’s always an open door,” she said. “Sometimes the neighbors are over. People come by all the time because we appreciate it so much.”
Both of Hudgins’ parents help look after their four grandchildren, whether it’s Miss Ha who cooks the children’s dinner four nights a week, even when she gets home from work at 7pm, or her father who does the taking kids from school to ballet practice and anywhere in between.
“Growing up, it was always about taking care of your family,” Hudgins said. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”
And to give back, Hudgins has a special goal in mind for her mother, who earned her nickname Miss Ha while working at the former Piggly Wiggly on downtown Meeting Street.
“It was her first job ever,” Hudgins said. “Her name is Thu-Ha, but they couldn’t pronounce her name, so they all called Miss Ha. And I don’t think she ever thought as she went grocery shopping every day that one day she would have a scannable product that would be hers. That’s the goal – to have their products, their food, packaged to be shared across the country.
It is at the heart of why we all do what we do.”
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