During lunch times at my elementary school, I remember hiding my neatly packed Tupperware containers filled with kimchi fried rice and toasted seaweed in my backpack, pretending to have forgotten my lunch at home. I was painfully conscious about the difference between the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches my classmates brought to school and my meals that would cause my backpack to smell for days. Food was an indicator of how different I was, and I wanted to blend in with the rest of my all-white school. However, since entering college and living away from home, I crave the spicy tofu stews and other traditional Korean dishes my mother often makes.
Food has become one of the most important components of my Asian American identity. I eat ketchup with my fried rice and sriracha sauce with my pasta. The fusion of different food cultures into the American dining experience is symbolic of the melding of contrasting identities. It is a keeping of tradition from our ancestors and also a continuously changing, expanding culture of its own. Food is perhaps the most ubiquitous indicator of the presence and formation of Asian American culture in the US. Therefore, Asian American chefs are significant actors helping create and define Asian American cuisine as well as the Asian American identity. They are widening the scope of American dining, introducing new flavors into the traditional American palate.
The first thing which needed to be done to compile the list was defining the term “Asian American chef”. The term Asian American chef can cover many aspects of a chef’s identity including ethnicity, nationality and professional history. For sake of this project, I have defined it as a chef of Asian-Pacific Islander descent who has established a career in the US while cooking Asian inspired cuisine. I also have compiled the list as one pertaining to the current year of 2008, meaning that I have chosen the chefs based on who each are today as well as what they’ve accomplished. Since “best chef” is a very subjective title, I attempted to compile the list in a more objective, research-led way. The following chefs were chosen and ranked based on their fame, successful restaurant endeavors, recognition and how they shaped Asian American cuisine.
