Soup Lefty
Francesca Hong stormed out of her kitchen at Madison’s Morris Ramen to become the first Asian American member of the Wisconsin Legislature. Now she’s running for Governor.
By Steve Marsh
Photos by David Austin
This story was originally published in Meal Magazine Vol. 3, 2023.
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On St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers issued a statewide stay-at-home order as Covid-19 threatened to change the world. Just down the street from Madison’s state capitol, Francesca Hong agreed with her husband Matt to shutter their acclaimed ramen spot, Morris Ramen, that afternoon.
“Fear and uncertainty took over,” Hong tells me two years later, when we meet over a bowl of her magical pork broth elixir in the back corner of Morris, recently reopened for in-person dining. Unlike so many of her industry peers, her restaurant survived the pandemic and the constant disruptions that followed. But from that harrowing day when everything closed and all the scary days that followed, she knew that reopening was never assured for her steamy little ramen joint, where people breathe in this soup while the soup seems to breathe right back on them.
“Restaurants thrive on organized chaos,” she says. “You have your mise en place and your systems ready to go, but the variable is always the people.”
And for Hong, growing up an immigrant’s kid on Madison’s Near West Side—her parents are both academics who came to Wisconsin from Korea—it’s always been kind of hard to count on people. She says ever since she was a little girl, she felt out of place everywhere except working in a kitchen at a restaurant. And although the people ultimately returned to her restaurant, and she survived the pandemic with her business intact, the pandemic has irrevocably changed her life. For one thing, she says—although Hong and her husband will continue to parent their little girl and run Morris Ramen together—their marriage is in the midst of coming to an amicable but profoundly disappointing end. For another thing, in the fall of 2020, she ran for Senator Tammy Baldwin’s old Wisconsin Assembly seat—and shocked everybody by actually winning.
Now, at the age of 33, and as the first Asian to ever win an Assembly seat in Wisconsin, Hong’s made a name for herself with a sharp-elbowed, blue-checked Twitter account that reminds some of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, another smart young woman with a background in restaurant service and new ideas for how a political leader should communicate. “There's often a disconnect between politicians and working people,” Hong says. “How can you know what this is like, so how can you know what's best for us?”
Hong’s back-of-house background might help her become the agent of change she thinks her home state needs, but she’s not certain that she can even find a way to make a difference in a system that’s been so radically pitted against itself. “Wisconsin is what I call a petri dish for authoritarian tactics,” she says—a state where Madison and Milwaukee have become scapegoats for many of the pro-big business policies that have stirred up so much resentment in the countryside. She says at this point, she isn’t sure if her future will include politics or not, but she is sure she’ll always be involved with restaurants. “For me, what's most important is ensuring Wisconsin has a better democracy,” she says. “My biggest platform is through the office, but it's also through empowering people that work in restaurants, and don't feel seen, don't feel valued, and absolutely deserve it.”
On a cold, sunny January day over a bowl of hot ramen, Hong and I huddled in a corner booth while the lunch crowd came and went, and discussed her impact on Madison’s unique food scene and society beyond. And I suppose that’s everybody—because as they say, we all gotta eat.
Steve Marsh: Way before you won Tammy Baldwin’s old seat in the Assembly, and before you were a chef, you were a type-A captain of the soccer team at West Madison High. But I’ve read you didn’t know who you really were until you started working in a restaurant. Why?
Francesca Hong: At 18, I had a mental breakdown. I didn't actually walk at my high school graduation because I had been hospitalized for a week at a child psychiatric hospital. I just felt like nothing had meaning anymore. It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn't describe. I couldn't feel anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. And I found myself self-harming to feel something.
Marsh: Were you cutting yourself?
Hong: It was cutting. I was diagnosed with bipolar disease. I was taking SSRIs and I'd overdosed on lithium. I didn't know why I couldn't connect with people deeper, and that pushes you into isolation. But in restaurants, I didn't feel that. You see the best and worst of people here. It’s like, everyone wants to feel like they belong. I think a lot of the root causes were in being an immigrant's daughter, and wondering if my sacrifices would ever really justify my parents leaving their homeland to create a new life for me. And I think the people who come into restaurants come from so many different backgrounds and life experiences, and the best restaurant teams take care of one another so that you don't have to think about if you belong here or not.
Marsh: Oh, man. What did your parents think?
Hong: They didn't know what to do. We had never talked about mental health, we never talked about processing emotion and feelings. They honored my independence, and I was high-achieving on my own. Mom’s a music educator. Dad's a sociologist. Whenever you see your child helpless or in pain and you feel like you can't fix them with love—we felt that struggle as a collective family.
Marsh: Tell me about your first restaurant job, at the Mystic Grill here in Madison.
Hong: It was on the West Side of Madison, owned by a family friend. So it was all Korean people in the back of the house. Korean food. Well, at the time, that would've been defined more as Korean fusion food.
Marsh: They had bibimbap?
Hong: They had bibimbap. This was 2006, so they had a sweet soy marinated salmon with noodles, chicken thighs with noodles. They had jjamppong, which can be found at Chinese restaurants that have Korean-Chinese food.
Marsh: Are they still open?
Hong: I don’t even think they made it two years. I think they really wanted the food to be undefined. It’s what happens with a lot of Korean restaurants in Madison. It's very difficult to bridge the cultural gap—it's hard for a Korean place to make the Koreans happy and the white people happy. But you couldn't really find the right balance of people who wanted to go have traditional Korean food, and the people who went there and were, like, this is good fusion-y food, but it doesn't have the service that I expect for a non-ethnic restaurant. Ethnic restaurants are often just so boxed-in with how they have to be. You have to choose between catering to a whiter crowd, or catering to a crowd that is based in the ethnic food that you're serving.
Marsh: So how close was your connection to Korea growing up?
Hong: I would say we would try to go every couple of years, alternating between going there and the grandparents coming here, if they were healthy enough to come visit us. Probably over the course of a lifetime, I went eight or nine times. In the third grade, we went for the entire summer, and my sister and I went to school there.
Marsh: So did you feel as estranged there as you felt in Madison?
Hong: I definitely felt like an outsider there. I have an accent when I speak Korean.
Marsh: Did your parents cook growing up?
Hong: I mean, growing up, mom was going to school, so we knew early on to at least understand the basics, and had to make food for ourselves.
Marsh: So you were the cook.
Hong: I remember one of my first jobs was I volunteered to help make a hundred Christmas meals for a hundred men at a shelter through my parents' Catholic church. It was meat and potatoes. That was the first time I had to figure out how much prep goes into the execution of a meal for that many people. After that, La Brioche felt like my first real restaurant job, because I didn't know the owners. And it wasn’t just me working with like two other people. There was a team, there was a chef.
Marsh: You started on the line?
Hong: I started off out front, and I think there was one day someone didn't show up to work salads and they needed extra hands, and I jumped on because I'd been watching them do it.
Marsh: So when did you know you were good at this?
Hong: I was never that creative. So jumping on the salad line and learning to run expo on brunch—the rhythm and the energy--you have to learn to be a part of a team if you want to succeed in a restaurant. I don't think any other industry or job really forces you into making sacrifices and compromises to work with other people. I'm good at understanding where everyone fits in a production.
Marsh: Once you found your tribe, it was a gradual rise to leading a kitchen, which you did at 43 North in 2012. How did you meet the guy who gave you that opportunity, Madison local legend Shinji Muramoto?
Hong: I ate at his restaurants a lot. Most of my money went right back into buying food at restaurants and eating out alone. Reading cookbooks at restaurants, hoping the cooks would see me as cool enough to invite me out and learn from their experience, and then diving right into this culture of working the line, 16, 17 hours a day, going out hard and then going right back into the grind. And that culture, as toxic as it was, felt really safe for me, right?
Marsh: Restaurants are an island of misfit toys—we're all abusing each other, abusing drugs, working too hard.
Hong: Well, yeah, I don't think I ever made over $15k. I think my first salary was at 23-years-old, and I was probably working 50 hours a week.
Marsh: There’s a kind of a fucked up aspect of, like, society won't let me do anything else.
Hong: Restaurants are little ecosystems with symptoms of the worst societal systems outside of restaurants. So we open 43 North. Well, he didn't ask me, the other owner, Justin Carlisle did. Shinji and I are both very stubborn, and I think we operate similarly but don't always compromise similarly. So, I helped open 43, worked up from the line to doing pastries. That's where I learned the most. When the head chef left, Shinji was like, "I need you to run this--can you run this?" I said, "Yeah." Then I had to learn about management—I was self-taught. I became the head chef in late 2011.
Marsh: When do you meet your husband?
Hong: We got married in 2012.
Marsh: Did you meet him at work?
Hong: I met him because he was working for Shinji at his other restaurant, Muramoto.
Marsh: So you fell in love with one of Shinji’s chefs.
Hong: Another misfit chef. Yeah. We met at Maduro next door. I think it had the best bourbon list in town and I knew the bartender there, and I didn't know a ton of bartenders yet. I was 21 at the time so I was just starting to legally drink. And then at 23 I became head chef at 43 North. We got married in 2012, and then in 2014, I left the industry altogether.
Marsh: You did?
Hong: Totally burned out. I went and worked for a property management company called Urban Land Interests.
Marsh: And then you came back?
Hong: A friend of mine was, like, "Do you ever want to get back in the game?" So in 2015 I started line cooking at Merchant, and when that didn't work out, I went to Muramoto where my husband was the sous chef and I worked for him and Shinji. I remember the last night I was there, I was sweeping under the oven, scrubbing down the kitchen, and my kid was born five hours later.
Marsh: You went into labor scrubbing the kitchen?
Hong: Five hours after I got home from the restaurant my water broke. And that year we opened the ramen shop.
Marsh: Whose idea was the ramen shop?
Hong: Shinji approached Matt and I. We went to Japan in 2015. Matt worked in Japan for about three months. He worked in a small town called Obihiro, north of Sapporo, and he learned at an omakase restaurant. I remember he got so excited about the first time seeing a whole monkfish.
Marsh: He didn't just watch Tampopo over and over again?
Hong: No! I love that movie. But they didn't speak English and he didn't speak any Japanese, so they communicated over Google Translate on a iPad.
Marsh: That feels like a scene out of Tampopo.
Hong: Right? We spent a week in Japan together and traveled throughout Sapporo and Tokyo. And every night he would go out to the izakayas and experience Japanese street food. And we ate ramen every night. Didn't matter how many meals we had during the day, we would have ramen every night.
Marsh: This is delicious ramen, by the way.
Hong: Thank you. It's all Matt's recipe. My stuff is more the non-ramen items.
Marsh: What ideas did you take from the chefs in Japan?
Hong: Well, we knew that we wanted to have a miso and a house ramen, and we didn't want to delve into a lot of the more experimental or contemporary ramens. And Shinji, ramen is his soul food, right? It was very personal to him.
Marsh: What part of Japan is he from?
Hong: Sapporo, so miso ramen is his jam. He taught us a lot and he would do a lot of taste testing. We go for authenticity with the technique, while we honor local ingredients and recognize that soup is good for the soul. You ask any French chef and they would say if you make a good soup, it's a sign of a good chef.
Marsh: So it's a real Madison bowl of ramen, right?
Hong: The pork belly comes from Ney’s Premium Meats in Hartford, Wisconsin and the back fat is from Fox Heritage Farms in Sauk Prairie.
Marsh: How long have you been open now?
Hong: Five years.
Marsh: So three before the pandemic hit?
Hong: We did really well our first couple years. Folks really embraced the simplicity of the menu, the care we had for our staff, and the fact that we were literally a mom-and-pop joint. Matt and I were on the line every day. My baby was here—I was pumping in the basement. A lot of people talk about their restaurant family, and we wanted to make sure that it's something you could actually practice. So, yeah, I felt like my family grew from two to 20 that year.
Marsh: So working together all the time, while having a baby together—all that pressure of a new restaurant. Is it the restaurant’s fault your marriage failed?
Hong: We didn't make enough time to honor each other as individuals because we were so immersed in the restaurant and our child. And when you spend time with each other all day at work, you don't always feel like there needs to be a different investment in the relationship.
Marsh: Right. Did you take the partnership for granted when confronted with all the chaos that running a restaurant brings?
Hong: I mean, I think we're still a very good team.
Marsh: That’s so tough, Francesca.
Hong: It is. But I mean, humans are inherently selfish, and I think I saw myself growing out of the restaurant because of how strong our team was. At first, Matt and I would have to be here 12 to 15 hours a day, but we got to spot where we rarely had to be here in the evenings. We had a kiddo at home and so we made this a nine-to-five, and then we were needed less and less. That, and 45's election, ignited this need to find more people to help take care of, and that would take care of me. And between women and people who identify as non-binary, there's this group of phenomenally underrepresented folks in the food and beverage industry.
Marsh: Is this when you started the Culinary Ladies Collective?
Hong: Our first thing was a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in here that raised 2,500 bucks.
Marsh: And that was inspired by 45's election? In sort of the same way the Women’s March in Washington was?
Hong: Yeah. We were scared. I mean, a lot of things come out of fear, right?
Marsh: Absolutely.
Hong: And there are very few of us in privileged positions in the food and beverage industry where we actually control the decisions of the restaurant, right?
Marsh: When you say “we,” who are you referring to?
Hong: Specifically, women, women of color and non-binary folks who don't often see themselves as leaders in an industry. The most compassionate, hardworking people are just not valued and seen in an industry that's supposed to value and see everyone, because food is for everyone.
Marsh: That's the weird silver lining to the rise of Trump—he inspired this angry, opposing force.
Hong: He affirmed that we had all been very complacent and comfortable. And I don't think democracy is supposed to be comfortable if it's operating in the right way. It definitely shouldn't be comfortable for the folks who have been in positions of power.
Marsh: You found your community and then you decided to grow that community. Then the pandemic hit. Did you ever think you would run for office?
Hong: No. I think, especially with women and women of color, it oftentimes takes somebody else to see and value you because you're so immersed in taking care of others. I was asked, “the seat is becoming available, would you ever consider running for office?”
Marsh: Who asked?
Hong: Another member of the industry. Jonny Hunter. He runs the Underground Food Collective and Underground Meats. He was involved in his neighborhood association, and I think he's always been interested in politics. He just asked, would you ever consider it? And I said no.
Marsh: When was that?
Hong: End of March 2020.
Marsh: The stay-at-home order's in place, all of the sudden the restaurant's in trouble.
Hong: I was mouthing off on Twitter and I started letter writing campaigns. I said, look, I think folks are going to start realizing how much the restaurant community means before it's too late for many of us. We need to be proactive: we need to start thinking about eviction moratoriums, getting rent covered for our employees, making sure restaurants have access to forgivable loans. We need to start giving people money—they will know what to do with it.
Marsh: So you win, and one of the first initiatives you announced in this last year is to eliminate Wisconsin’s $2.33 tipped minimum wage. What do restaurant owners like Shinji think of your proposal?
Hong: The sustainability of our industry depends on the health of our workers. There are many good small business operators who understand that a local economy is dependent on the local people. It’s bad for business to have shitty policy that fucks over workers. The issue that I think a lot of operators are having is that unless things are changed at a policy level, there will always be bad actors who take advantage and exploit workers, and it does not have to be this way. Restaurants can be a sustainable industry, they can build careers, they can uplift so many other sectors. Look at where the arts and restaurants intersect. I think about the musicians that have worked here, and it can be a place where work is dignified and not exploited.
Marsh: Won’t owners just pass those costs onto the consumer by raising prices though? Won’t inflation make dining out—already an exclusive experience—even more exclusive?
Hong: I think the restaurant industry is reliant on income inequality, and it is absolutely reliant on the wealthy becoming wealthier. The nuances of inflation are also that those who are controlling a lot of the supply chains dictate the cost, and consumers absorb that cost. So capitalism has not been working for consumers or workers. There has to be transformative change in those economic structures, and it's going to come from more people fighting for economic justice. It starts with increasing wages and giving people agency over their wages, and then ensuring that the costs of childcare, transportation, housing, and education are seen as a public good, and that government itself can be used for good. It is a systems change that needs to happen. I am a business owner who is anti-capitalist because I know that for a business my size, I am no longer competing with other businesses my size.
Marsh: Who are you competing with?
Hong: I am competing with ghost kitchens, I am competing with fast-casual, I am competing with Mark [Cuban] investing in restaurant tech that I will never be able to afford, and I'm being priced out.
Marsh: Let’s talk about your Twitter account. Right after you got elected, you called the Wisconsin Tavern League “cunts.” That is the most chef shit I've ever heard. I was, like, "Okay, this chick has definitely worked in the back of the house."
Hong: [Laughs] They were fighting a “Safer at Home” order, and I don't understand how tavern operators could be, like, yeah, let's harm our customers more because it's good for business.
Marsh: Well, I mean, bar owners aren’t exactly all about wellness. So what’s the upside of some of your more incendiary tweets? Is there a political strategy, or is it more like, I need to get this off my chest?
Hong: I think it's really important that no matter what side of this massive polarization you're on, people want to be fought for, people want to be heard, and people want to know that you want to engage with them.
Marsh: Do you regret the cunt tweet?
Hong: No. I know that inflammatory or aggressive language can feel off-putting at first, but I am expressing my right to be emotional, to be personal, to be human. So this is me being a human—angry, frustrated, and scared that there are forces that I don't have control over impacting the people that I care about. Part of it is in redefining who a politician is: somebody with a foul mouth who works in the dish pit on a Saturday night. There’s a lack of curiosity and creativity in politics. And if I can be someone that can continue to agitate and use activism as a way to push policy from the inside to the outside …
Marsh: But isn't activism best when it's in-person and actually human? Aren't you, by agitating like this on these platforms owned by billionaires, just satisfying the dopamine cravings of social media addicts?
Hong: But I'm not just on Twitter. I have a responsibility, because I say those things on Twitter, to meet people where they are. Twitter is an engagement tool, a tool for letting people know that I feel pain that you are feeling too. Relational organizing depends on me making connections with people, and it's not always going to come from a place of peaceful discourse. We are past that. I used to have people accuse me of being like Trump, and now two years later, they see what the intention was: to literally dismantle democracy and overturn an election.
Marsh: He knew how to use Twitter to make somebody feel what he wanted them to feel. And you're good at that too.
Hong: We need everybody to fight for democracy right now, and we can't expect everyone to be boxed in and fight just one way. And I think the first step into getting people engaged in protecting a democracy is to ensure that they feel like they're being fought for and cared for. I've started this campaign saying that it's about community care and preserving our humanity, and I still fully honor and believe that. And if saying that I truly believe in my heart that they are cunts is going to get you to engage with me, I’m trying to bring along as many people as we can.
Marsh: What’s your definition of that word?
Hong: Of a cunt? Someone who chooses to actively harm others. When you know you're being an asshole and you're going to be an asshole anyway, you're being a cunt.
Marsh: The ramen shop is right down the street from the capitol. Ever serve Republicans soup?
Hong: Staffers. I didn't know they were Republican then, I know now.
Marsh: So you eventually found your community in restaurants. Have you found your community at the Capitol?
Hong: There is immensely strong leadership in our communities, and my job is to learn from them and amplify their concerns, their suggestions, their knowledge on the platform that I have. And in the Capitol, I have absolutely found that it is a relationship game. And there are folks that I vibe with really well, and there are folks that I have to keep at arm's length. But coming to the restaurant to wash dishes is where I feel safest.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.