Before the chef’s coat.
My Chinatown story starts with daycare, Yung Wing Public School—P.S. 124—and beef cheung fun before class. For about seven years, those warm rice noodle rolls were part of my morning near Transfiguration Church. Columbus Park was my playground. Long before I learned to cook professionally, this neighborhood was teaching me what food could mean.
Learning Chinese cooking from the inside.
In 1997, at seventeen, I worked at Jolly King Restaurant on the Bowery and learned from Sifu Chan. Handling seafood, helping around the live tanks, and watching the wok station showed me how much preparation goes into a dish that reaches the table in minutes. I began to understand the skill and teamwork behind the food I had grown up eating.
I went on to study at the French Culinary Institute and The Culinary Institute of America. French training gave me another foundation, while Chinese cooking remained part of who I was. At Shang on the Lower East Side, I worked for chef Susur Lee on a station with two fryers, two woks, and six burners. It demanded timing, organization, and attention to several dishes at once.
My Chinese cooking background also includes Lotus and Cleaver in Miami, where I developed classic wok and Chinese barbecue dishes, and work at China Grill. Those kitchens gave me different ways to carry Chinese flavors and techniques into my own cooking.
Cajun is in my blood.
I spent about a decade leading the kitchens at The Boil and The Boil Prime, cooking Louisiana-style seafood. That chapter has a family connection: my great-grandfather was drying shrimp in Louisiana in the 1920s. When I say “Cajun is in my blood,” I’m talking about that personal thread—Chinese food traditions meeting the Gulf Coast, generations before I cooked my own seafood boils.
Cooking, culture & heritage
Behind the wok at MOFAD.
As exhibition chef at the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), I cooked for CHOW: The Making of a Chinese American Restaurant at its former Greenpoint location in Brooklyn. I chose different Chinese American restaurants to feature—including OK218, Wo Hop, NB Wing Wong, and Downtown Yummy—and brought their dishes and stories into the exhibition.
That experience connected my life in restaurant kitchens to the larger Chinese American story: families building livelihoods, cooks adapting, and communities preserving their identity through food. I also contributed research and helped develop the shoebox lunch concept and its contents with six selected chefs for MOFAD’s African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.
Keeping the culture moving.
Since 1993, I’ve studied with Master Yip Wing Hong at his Dragon Style Kung Fu and Tai Chi club. I also take part in lion dance, playing the drums, gong, and cymbals and performing in the lion’s head and tail. Cooking, martial arts, and lion dance are all ways I stay connected to my Chinese heritage.
My family’s story reaches beyond Chinatown, too. My grandfather served in World War II; my great-grandfather’s shrimp work connects us to Louisiana. On the walk, I’ll share more of those stories alongside the neighborhood’s history and the people who keep it alive.
New Wok City Tours brings these parts of my life to one table. I want you to taste the food, understand the work behind it, and leave knowing the Chinatown that helped make me a chef.
