MK Pho brings Hmong cuisine to south Lansing

When Maikou Vang gave ownership of Ming Dynasty Asian Cuisine to her daughter and son-in-law in 2022, she did so with the intention of retiring.

Retirement, as it turned out, was tremendously boring to her.

“I can’t stay home and do nothing,” Vang said. “I’m always expecting myself to do something.”

When she saw the southside eatery Perfect Chinese was closing, Vang reached out and made the owners an offer. On April 22, she jumped back into the restaurant business and opened MK Pho Asian Cuisine.

The restaurant offers freshly prepared Asian food from across cultures. Its specialty is the titular pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup. Vang, who is Hmong and from Laos, gets visibly excited talking about her unique pho recipe, which takes inspiration from both Lao and Vietnamese pho.

For something closer to her home, Vang recommends the papaya salad. The dish mixes green papaya, which is less ripe than a standard papaya and is typically used as a vegetable rather than a fruit in Southeast Asian cuisine, with tomatoes, tamarind, lime, fish sauce, palm sugar and hot peppers. A staple in Thai, Vietnamese and Lao cuisine, the Hmong style of papaya salad has a sweeter, darker sauce.

MK Pho also serves laab, a ground meat salad and staple dish in Hmong cuisine, as well as pad Thai and Asian American classics like lo mein, crab rangoon and General Tso’s chicken.

Vang, who came to the Lansing area in 1995, had “always” wanted to run her own restaurant before opening Ming Dynasty. The Holt resident said cooking for her family made her want to open a business.

At MK Pho, she still cooks as she does for her family: Everything is made fresh.

“I don’t know how else to do it,” she said.

Vang is excited to be back behind the counter at MK Pho doing what she loves. Before officially deciding where to reopen, she said she would walk around nearby restaurants to see if any storefronts were opening up soon. The business has been a hit online, with rave reviews in Facebook groups like Lansing Foodies.

Vang said that’s intentional. Rather than focus on advertising, her priority is to make good food and let the word spread.

“We just opened, so it’s still not that busy yet,” she said. “But we are just trying to make the best food we can.”