Xinh: A Profile Beyond Her Food
Driving down hill into Shelton the bay appears to my right, along with the lumber mill that is whispering steam slowly up into the sky. Shelton is no longer thought of much when it comes to logging, but is thought of often when it comes to shellfish. It’s been the home to multiple family run farms for over last 130 years like my own Taylor Shellfish, but it’s also the home of Xinh’s Clam & Oyster House. Xinh’s, pronounced like the word “sin”, is the seafood showstopper of this South Puget Sound town. It’s named after its chef Xinh Dwelley, a Vietnamese immigrant who shares her unique American-Vietnamese-seafood-comfort-food with everyone she meets.
A variety of fresh shucked oysters, geoduck sashimi, yellow curried mussels, and steamed clams in black-bean hoisin sauce are just a few of the dishes the locals line up for. People come not just for her food, but also to be around Xinh’s atmosphere. She’s more than a chef. She laughs uncontrollably with her restaurant’s patrons and seems to instantly command the respect of a room with her big personality and obvious love for food. She’s a workhorse, even as she goes through chemo treatments she manages to keep the restaurant’s doors open, and people in her community respect and resonate with that mentality.
I’ve known Xinh my whole life, but I’ve actually never known very much about her life. My first memory of her is when I was five sitting on my father’s shoulders at Shelton’s Oyster Festival shucking competition watching her rip through a pile of oysters as fast as a raging whirlpool. Placing each opened oyster onto a plate of ice without spilling a drop of its liquor or knocking shell into its firm little body she threw her hands up to signal to the judges she had finished. They inspected her plate one oyster at a time, nodding at her clean work. My dad pointed at the judges and explained how they had to inspect everyone’s plates and add time for every butchered oyster. He seemed confident the Xinh would win. At that time I didn’t know why, but now as I entered the restaurant I could see the multiple shucking championships plaques hung on the wall and I felt the confidence in her that my dad had shown me that day.
Xinh’s restaurant isn’t much to look at, at first; it’s old, sort of beige, and has metal sea-creatures on the walls. Once you get past that and the linoleum floors you start to see photos of Xinh with some of the top chefs and food personalities on the planet. Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, and Andrew Zimmern are a few that are laughing within the frames along side Xinh’s signature smile, pulled back hair, and apron. I laugh to myself as I recalled the time she rolled her eyes at the cheeky host of Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe, for trying to eat a raw geoduck stomach during a segment they were filming after advising him against eating the algae filled gut.
I entered the kitchen to the look of shock from her line cooks; people don’t generally stroll into her kitchen as casually as I had. Xinh sat perched on top of a stool chopping scallions, not noticing me but noticing the fact that her staff had abruptly stopped their tasks. When she finally saw where their attention had gone she shouted “Hi honey!” I approached to give her a hug. She still had that same big smile, hair pulled back, apron on, but she was older now and her round face seemed to be gaunter than it used to.
She came down off her stool and into a wheel chair, revealing a broken leg. “I fell in my garage,” she said as we left the kitchen behind. Before I could finish asking if it’s hard running a kitchen in a wheel chair she was waving her hands in the air and saying “no, I just tell these boys what to do.” She let’s very little get in between her and her work. It’s been about two years since she found out she has cancer and at first she acted like nothing had changed. Her family and friends begged her to stop working and focus on her health, but she fought that idea, not wanting to change her life. With a lot of pushing and shoving from the doctors around her she finally agreed that she would cut down the restaurant to just four days a week. She’s the type of person that if you asked her to slow down she’d probably swing a pan at you until you got out of her kitchen, which I’m sure she did to my dad when he would visit her with that advice.
We sat down at a table and started chatting about my family. She told me not to turn on the recorder until she was done telling me what she thinks of certain people that she says snub her for not being a “professionally” trained chef. Finally I asked her to tell me about her life in Vietnam. She sighed and said I could turn on the recorder.
“This is a long story, but I will make it short…and then you can do something with that,” she gestured largely as if to point out that she wasn’t a person worth writing about. She readjusted herself in her wheel chair so she could lean forward and talk with her hands. “I came from Vietnam in 1970, but before that I was living on a farm in the rice field community. I worked in the field with my dad until I was fourteen.” She continued to move around in her chair, obviously not used to sitting still. She proceeded to tell me how she was then employed by the American military to clear fields for bunkers, doing the base’s laundry, cleaning the mess halls, and after that she’d stick around to make extra money by cooking dinner for the military cooks.
Xinh was reluctant to talk about the war, being fourteen and seeing your country being ripped apart by war isn’t something she obviously wanted to recount. Xinh chose to focus on the positive aspects of having a looming foreign military offering better pay than she’d ever seen to do tasks she already did at home. She speaks positively of her experiences on the base, probably because that’s where she was taught to cook and she credits that to where she is now as opposed to be being one of the approximately three million dead in Vietnam by the end of the war. The cooks she fed each night liked the “chicken sweet and sour” her mother showed her to make so much that they took her on and began to teach her how to cook three meals a day for over 300 people.
“They taught me how to make fried chicken, but then I’d go home to my mom and ask her how to season it better because they don’t really season it or use the salt in the military.” Xinh brushed the top of the table with her hands, wiping away invisible crumbs, and using the edges of the table to move from side to side in her chair. She described to me how they taught her how to make pot roast, potatoes, and hamburgers all the while gesturing and smiling about her first real formative cooking experience. “I learned how to make American food before I even learned Vietnamese food. I remember what my mother cooked, the spices mostly, but it was a lot of rice and soup and things we could eat from our farm.” She talked very warmly about wanting to support her family. She even lied to the military about her age so they would let her work, even though the pay, she said, was maybe a few bucks a day.
“When I was growing up I thought that my family were really poor, but then I realized we weren’t poor. We were never hungry. We had our farm and we could barter with people from that, get some of what we couldn’t make ourselves from that.” The extra money she earned for her family went into buying them a bushel of salt for the year or things that the war had made too expensive to get a hold of like meat and sugar. She would be at the army base all day cooking and come home to help her mother cook dinner and clean. In describing how long she worked each day she mentioned not sleeping some days because after getting home she would have to turn around and head back to make the officers breakfast. It became very apparent to me that Xinh got very lucky she loved cooking for people and that for most of the other Vietnamese employed by the military were probably there out of fear or desperation. Xinh never mentions being discriminated against either, but you can tell by her sharp wit now that her past must have been holding her tongue until people left the room.
She readjusted again in the wheel chair, now playing with the break as she actually got a bit choked up before she went on. “I liked what I did there so I was happy to go. I think somehow god gave me talent because everything I season people like, who knows maybe because it’s a bit different but in something familiar.” It’s easy to see Xinh likes to see others enjoying food, if she can share some of what she loves about food with you then she feels accomplished.
She started giggling, “The first time I made rice, I burned it! I thought ‘oh no I can’t cook’, but it was because they had a gas stove and I only ever cooked rice by burning wood before.” Laughing at her past self she started to shift gears and began to tell me about how she came to the United States. When she was 19 years old she married an American soldier and after his second tour in Vietnam he was able to bring her and their newborn son back to Washington State. Their marriage didn’t last much longer after their second child was born. Xinh admitted that she expected to have headed back to Vietnam within five years of leaving, but in 75’ Vietnam fell and she lost all contact with her family. Xinh began working anywhere she could to support herself. She went to working a series of jobs on a mushroom farm, selling egg rolls at the local farmers market, digging clams, until she started shucking oysters for Rock Point Oysters in Olympia, Washington.
Eventually she wound up working as an oyster shucker for Taylor Shellfish and in the retail-store selling shellfish to the locals. “Here and there I don’t remember everything I did, but I cooked for people at work and buyers at lunch.” Not realizing it Xinh was building a local fan base. People would come into the retail-store and have a chat with her big smile and try some of her curried mussels before they were all devoured by her fellow shuckers. She continued to work for Taylor Shellfish and began to integrate more and more seafood into her cooking and showing customers new ways of preparing the locally farmed seafood.
One day the owners of a local cafe came into the retail store and told her that her food always smelled so good that she should take over their café. “I asked how much they wanted for their café and they said $30,000. I told your dad and uncle about it, and they said they would give me $60,000 to get it started.” Xinh started sweeping the table again with her hands, pushing around more invisible crumbs.
“I was so scared, what if it doesn’t work? It’s not my money. I cared because I wanted it to work, but also because I have to make it work if someone else going to put money and faith in me.” That was the first moment I’d realized that Xinh actually had been intimidated by what laid ahead of her, and that everything she gained from starting her own restaurant was exactly why she would never back off even now that she had cancer. That even going through that wouldn’t stop her from continuing because she felt like she owed it to the community that got her there. That’s a lot of pressure she put on herself, but she seemed to manage it with an iron fist. Not letting her employees slack and pushing herself to learn not only what she liked to cook, but what her customers wanted to eat.
Xinh belted out a laugh and continued on. “It started pretty good and six months later we were so busy we had a line going outside.” It was small at first, only seating about twenty-five. Soon she expanded into the next-door flower shop Xinh’s Clam and Oyster House began taking on a reputation for the best seafood diner in the South Puget Sound. Xinh’s curried mussel’s won amateur chefs awards, her oyster stew became a sought after recipe, and she even got to meet one of her idols, Julia Child. “For me it was like ‘I’m nothing and she is her’ so I was so happy to watch her try to open the oysters with a butter knife.” The best part about opening her own restaurant though was that it allowed her to return home to Vietnam for the first time in 25 years and reconnect with her family. “When I go home now I get to cook for my whole family.”
Xinh’s experiences have made her strong, but also stubborn and tough. My dad says she has kicked out tons of employees for not doing exactly what she wants. Xinh doesn’t take people’s crap because she wants to focus on the positives in her life. Her life advice is, “Not everyone that you meet is going to love you or even like you, but as long as I meet people that enjoy what I do I’ll feel love for my work.”
She wheeled herself out from the table signaling that she needed to get back into the kitchen and prep for dinner. Xinh seems like an unstoppable woman. She has plans to return home again in October 2015, and she wants to keep her restaurant open as long as she can keep up with it. She is even holding a chowder cook off this spring to fundraise for the hospital’s recovery center for cancer patients. She is trying to training new cooks in her kitchen all the time and passing on the idea of cooking whatever flavors come naturally for you. “Everyone is a good cook in their own heart, they just have cook with their own flavor.”
