In the Kitchen Basil Babe’s Hauthai Inhmathong

Modern Family: Basil Babe Keeps Family Traditions Alive

TWO WOMEN, mother and daughter, stand at a prep table in a tiny storefront, a bowl of spicy ground pork mixed with herbs in front of them.

Each takes a small circle of paper-thin dough and adds a heaping spoonful of filling to the center. Next, each dips a finger in a small bowl of water, then runs it over the perimeter of the wrapper. Now, the dough is folded over the filing, patted into place; even a tiny air bubble will make a dumpling blow up when it’s dropped in a deep fryer. Last step: Each woman deftly pleats the edges of her half-moon-shaped dumplings.

The daughter holds one up. The dumpling turns up at the corners, exactly mirroring the shape of her irrepressible smile.

Her name is Haluthai Inhmathong. Her mother, Vasanna Inhmathong, who goes by Ying, is the former owner of Siam Square restaurant in Ann Arbor.

The younger woman is also Basil Babe, proprietor of the phenomenally successful pop-up shop of the same name.

Basil Babe the biz is completely homegrown, starting with how Haluthai Inhmathong learned to cook. “My whole family’s very food-centric. Mom just taught me how to make stuff as I grew up. And I’ve also learned from my aunties and my cousins. My grandparents had 13 kids, so I have a lot of cousins.”

Bored and restless working an advertising job from home during the pandemic, Haluthai Inhmathong initially looked for “something I could do with my mom. We don’t really have dumplings in Thai cuisine—Mom is Thai, Dad is Lao—and so I looked up how to fold them on YouTube. My first batch didn’t look anywhere near perfect, but tasted great.”

A natural extrovert, it wasn’t long before she’d enlisted a dumpling recruit. “Teaching Mom was a way to hang out with her in the pandemic.”

Since it makes no sense to make just a few dumplings, she ended up with big batches. So she’d post on Instagram, offering to deliver extras to friends’ doors.

Very quickly, her schedule became, in a word, nuts. Continuing her day job, she’d make dumplings in her spare time up to delivery day, which involved about five hours of driving.

“Then I realized, ‘I’m tired of being anxious at my desk, not being my true self, not being able to connect with humans like I used to be able to when there were meetings. Everything’s through a computer. I’m unhappy. I’m gonna quit!’”

She left Detroit and returned to her home turf, the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area. And Basil Babe quickly evolved into a thriving pop-up.

Now, she’s enlisted her dad, Sinnasone Inhmathong, to help; he’d done a lot of the prep work for Siam Square. (“His vegetable cuts are perfect,” says Haluthai Inhmathong.) She wanted to draw from her own heritage as well as from around Asia for the fillings. Many feature ground meats with multiple flavors, including kimchi, coconut milk, lemongrass, and fresh herbs—especially her all-time favorite flavor, basil. “That’s why we’re Basil Babe.”

But experiments with vegetarian ingredients, particularly intensely flavored tofu curries, resulted in unexpected hits.

“When you think dumpling, you don’t necessarily go to tofu,” she says, “but it’s amazing how well it works. Our vegetarian dumplings are some of the most popular ones we make.”

Up until recently, Basil Babe had a steady gig at Cultivate in Ypsilanti. When it closed, she found no shortage of venues.

“We’re booked two or three times a week through the end of the year,” she says. York Food & Drink and Ann Arbor Distilling are two places to watch.

And Side Biscuit, a new storefront selling wings on the corner of Packard and Woodlawn in Ann Arbor, had even more to offer. Owner Jordan Balfur not only provides Inhmathong with a prep kitchen, “He’s my ‘big brother.’ I’ve definitely found more family to learn from.”

On store days, people are coming from as far as Ohio to pick up frozen dumplings—or “dumpies,” as Basil Babe calls them—as well as to nosh on fresh ones right from the fryer. “We deep-fry them at the pop-ups because that’s the easiest way to do volume,” says Haluthai Inhmathong. “But at home, you can pan-fry them, or steam them, and they’re great.”

For those who want to use air fryers, she recommends Basil Babe spring rolls, noting that air-fried dumplings will have a harder texture. It’s not her preference, but “some people like them that way.”

Given Basil Babe’s breakneck pace— about 1,500 dumplings in an average week—there’s not a lot of room to look into the future. Still, “I definitely want a brick-and-mortar store at some point. I want to follow in my mom’s footsteps. Though for now, we’re really happy with the pop-ups.”

To find out when and where Basil Babe will be next, follow @basilxbabe on Instagram.

“I love Instagram!” says Haluthai Inhmathong. “That’s where I find out what people love most, what they’d like to see in future dumplings. I ask questions, play games with my followers. It’s such a great communication tool.”

Frequently requested: a dessert dumpling. “That would be tricky,” she admits. “But you know what? Anyone can make anything.”

She shrugs and laughs in quick succession.

Then she and her mom make more dumplings.

Find Basil Babe at basilbabe.com.