Having fried 10,000 chicken wings for Super Bowl Sunday alone, Jimmy Le and his mother, Nho Thi Le (affectionately known as Mama Hieu), showed no signs of fatigue. In fact, the mother-son team behind Westminser’s new Mama Hieu’s Vietnamese Fried Chicken, were brimming with energy mere days after the big game as they put the finishing touches inside their first brick-and-mortar store, which softly opens Friday, Feb. 23.
The anticipation of Mama Hieu’s Vietnamese Fried Chicken, named after the family matriarch’s sobriquet, has been palpable — arguably one of Orange County’s most anticipated restaurants to open this year. Small wonder as their pandemic-born enterprise became an instant hit ever since Jimmy and Mama Hieu started preparing and selling Vietnamese-style butter wings (cánh gà chiên bơ tỏi) as a pop-up operation from inside their Garden Grove home in late 2020.
After losing their jobs due to pandemic-related reasons — both have strong culinary backgrounds, with Nho Thi once working as head chef at Fullerton’s Pho 88 and Jimmy inside the kitchen at Ballast Point Brewing in Long Beach — Jimmy had to figure out what to do to make money as the world came to a standstill.
“Honestly, it all started with my son’s birthday party,” said Jimmy Le. “For my son’s birthday, we had a birthday party that was all family and my mom made her chicken wings.”
Mama Hieu’s chicken wings, which are fried to shatteringly-crisp perfection and then tossed in an umami-packed garlic butter sauce, had been a staple at the Le household for years, be it Christmastime or any given Sunday night meal. “Afterwards, I was like, we should really do something with this fried chicken,” Jimmy continued. “And that’s when I pitched my mom the idea of starting a business.”
The Le family’s idea, a brilliant one in a time of worldwide distress, was an instant hit. As restaurants and other businesses shuttered around the globe in 2020, the rise of…
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