Summer evenings are hot in Fort Smith, Arkansas, but seven-year-old Nina Singto doesn’t mind. Feet on the pedals, hands on the bars, butt on the seat — she rolls her little bicycle with its big basket full of freshly picked herbs and vegetables from her grandmother’s garden past neighbor after neighbor, all gathered in their front yards beneath porches and trees to catch a break from the stifling heat. Nina calls out to them in their native Laotian. Like herself, they are refugees, newly minted Americans, albeit ones with a taste for the flavors from their original Southeast Asian homes.
“Mak nav! (lemongrass)” Nina shouts out. “Phikkhu! (peppermint) San Bolisud! (holy basil) Mak phik thai! (peppers).”
The basket on the little bike quickly empties as the pockets on the little girl quickly fill.
“As a young child, I was hustling and bustling,” Nina says with a laugh, sitting in her sparkling new Thai Esane location in Brentwood, one of three restaurants this gifted chef and savvy entrepreneur now owns. “Growing up we didn’t have much. A little hustle and bustle here and there — it helped.”
For Nina, that hustle and bustle began in her grandmother’s big backyard, helping grow the garden, and soon graduated to her grandmother’s kitchen, helping to feed the family. Aw lahm, a traditional and spicy Laotian beef stew, was the first dish that she learned to cook.
“Still to this day, that’s the best,” Nina says. “That’s the food that brings the whole family together. I’ve just passed it down to my kids now.”
Still, while her passion for cooking and feeding others developed in her grandmother’s kitchen, it wasn’t until 2007 that Nina began to share her culinary skills with the public. Her parents had opened King Market, a grocery store and cafe in Antioch specializing in Southeast Asian food and needed Nina’s help. It proved life changing. Nina had been cutting hair. Now she was cooking and serving, reawakening the feelings she had first experienced as a child in her grandmother’s kitchen. “I knew growing up that cooking and feeding others was just my passion,” she says. She decided to pursue it.