Santana Hem: From Finance to Khmer Cuisine, a Richmond Chef's Rise

He left a career in finance for New York kitchens, before founding Hem and Her in Richmond, Virginia, and becoming the first chef-in-residence at VCU's Institute for Contemporary Art. Through his pop-ups and his signature cookies, Santana Hem, the son of Cambodian refugees, reinvents his mother's cooking and carries, dish by dish, the memory of the Khmer diaspora in the United States.

Santana Hem, the chef behind Hem and Her - @lCA Cafe

A Childhood Shaped by Exile

Santana Hem grew up in Springfield, in Northern Virginia, in a family of Cambodian immigrants. His mother, Vichheka, fled the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1980s before making her way to the United States. Like many children of refugees, Santana Hem long knew the family's history only in fragments, picked up from conversations between adults rather than told to him directly.

The chef says he doesn't speak Khmer fluently but understands it well enough that, as a child, he caught pieces of that painful past. It was only later that he fully grasped its weight. This reticence around trauma is common among Cambodian-American families in the Richmond area, home to one of the largest Khmer communities in Virginia.

With words often unavailable, it was through cooking that the bond between mother and son was built. Long, quiet hours spent rolling spring rolls or kneading dough for steamed buns: that is how Santana Hem learned the gestures of traditional Khmer cooking, without written recipes.

From Finance to the Kitchens of Momofuku

Santana Hem's relationship with the restaurant industry began early: at 16, he was a busboy at a sports bar, and he was already spending time in professional kitchens before his senior year of college. The first in his family to attend college, he studied finance at Virginia Tech and, after graduation, landed a corporate job that matched his parents' expectations. But on weekends, he was already cooking behind the scenes, including at Trummer's on Main in Clifton, Virginia.

The corporate life lasted only a year. Santana Hem quit, moved to New York and started as a line cook at David Chang's Momofuku Ssäm Bar, before moving on to Marta and Martina, Danny Meyer's Italian restaurants, and then to Craft, Tom Colicchio's flagship. Many of these spots have since closed, a chapter of the New York dining scene the chef now recalls with a touch of nostalgia.

That immersion in New York's professional kitchens gave him a solid grounding in European and contemporary American cuisine, as well as real experience in front-of-house service and wine. A classic chef's path — until he decided to fold his mother's culinary heritage into it.

Hem and Her: Khmer Cooking for the Second Generation

In 2017, in a small New York City apartment, Santana Hem launched Hem and Her, a culinary project conceived as a bridge between his training as a chef and the flavors of his childhood. Now based in Church Hill, a historic Richmond neighborhood, the concept takes the form of pop-ups and supper-club-style dinners, hosted at his own home since 2022, generally about once a month.

On the menu: bok lahong, the green papaya salad with dried shrimp and peanuts; crispy pork-and-shrimp spring rolls known as tuh yawh; amok trey, a curry-steamed red snapper; and grilled beef paired with fermented fish and eggplant. Sesame, coconut, lemongrass, fermented fish (prahok) and shrimp paste recur as the pillars of his Khmer cooking.

Santana Hem has also added a pastry that has become the house's signature: his brown butter, black sesame and chocolate chip cookies, joined in season by a strawberry and Kampot pepper version. The chef makes between 400 and 500 of them a week, now shipped nationwide. He describes his Khmer cooking as free of any pressure toward "authenticity," preferring to tell his own story rather than conform to a fixed idea of tradition. His wife, Casey Forman, handles the front of house at the dinners.

A Chef Residency at the Institute for Contemporary Art

In October 2025, Hem and Her reached a new milestone: Santana Hem became the very first chef-in-residence at the Abby Moore Cafe, at Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). The new program, designed to support Richmond's independent culinary artists, gave him a regular space to present reimagined Khmer fare through a counter-service brunch series, before wrapping up in March 2026 with a special ticketed dinner.

The residency at an institution devoted to contemporary art underscored the cultural dimension of Santana Hem's work, straddling family cooking and artistic practice. It also opened the door to freer experiments, such as a pop-up blending Khmer and Italian influences at Giorno Market in Church Hill, featuring jasmine rice arancini, lemongrass focaccia and a Khmer tiramisu with jasmine and toasted coconut.

Honoring a Family Legacy

Beyond the plate, Hem and Her has become, for Santana Hem, a way of fully embracing his Cambodian-American identity, at a time when many children of Khmer refugees grew up keeping their heritage at a distance in order to fit in. Today, the chef stays connected to his roots mainly through his parents, especially his mother, for whom he recently built a greenhouse in Virginia so she can grow the lemongrass, chili peppers, eggplant and herbs she uses in her cooking.

Among the plants in that family garden, a kaffir lime tree his mother has tended since arriving in the United States holds a special place: a tree older than Santana Hem himself, which he plans to inherit one day.

A Dream: A Cambodian Restaurant in Richmond

For now, Hem and Her remains a pop-up and mail-order operation, but Santana Hem harbors a bigger ambition: opening his own Cambodian restaurant in Richmond, at a time when Khmer dining options are only beginning to emerge in a city long dominated by Italian and French cuisine. It would be, he says, a way to honor both his mother and the wider Cambodian-American community of Virginia.

In the meantime, upcoming Hem and Her events are announced at hemandherfood.com and on Instagram @hemandherfood.