You can’t throw a rock in America without hitting a resto that doesn’t use migrant labor. In fact, immigration is crucial to our entire food system. 70 percent of agricultural workers are migrants, as are 20-30 percent of the back-of-house staff at any given eatery.
For so many people coming to America, the restaurant industry is the starting point for pursuing the American dream. Eventually, some of these very same immigrant workers open their own restaurants, food trucks, and stands all over the country. They put in the hard work, climb the ladder, and rise through talent and force of will.
To list these places would just seem futile — gems like Barbacoa in Philly are literally all around you, ripe for discovery. Instead, let’s look at celebrity chefs who were born outside of this country and chased their American Dreams, leaving our food culture so much better in the process.
CECILIA CHIANG
You best bow down and recognize! Cecilia Chiang once had to spend five months walking across China to flee marauding Imperial Japanese invaders. She escaped the communists a few years later, ending up in Tokyo. It wasn’t until 1960, when she was 40, that she wound up running a restaurant at her sister’s failed property. And that’s how Americans were introduced to northern Mandarin Chinese cuisine. Her restaurant changed the game and became a San Francisco legend.
Chiang is credited with introducing Hunan, Szechuan, and Mandarin cuisine to America. She was also the first non-white resident to gain access to San Francisco’s affluent St. Francis Wood neighborhood — again, you better recognize, this woman broke down barriers left and right. Her contribution to American cuisine and restaurants earned her a James Beard Lifetime Achievement award in 2013 (James Beard was one of her students). Oh, and her son, Philip, is the co-founder of P.F. Chang’s. So there’s that.
Chiang’s influence and lineage of chefs, waiters, and restaurateurs is a deeply rooted part of all our heritage.
GIADA De LAURENTIIS
Giada De Laurentiis has been making Italian cooking look good on The Food Network since 2003. She’s also an Italian who immigrated with her mother and siblings to LA in 1977. When she arrived she “didn’t speak a word of English.” De Laurentiis had a pretty hard time at school as an immigrant kid and found solace in the family kitchen. As adulthood arrived she had little interest in the family business (her granddad is the legendary film producer Dino De Laurentiis), so she went to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. De Laurentiis worked the LA restaurant scene and came up under the tutelage of Wolfgang Puck at Spago (more on him later).
De Laurentiis certainly didn’t introduce Italian cuisine to American palates, however she unquestionably has had a hand in popularizing a more authentic approach to Italian food in America (she’s been ridiculed for her enunciation of Italian words in an Italian accent — an ironic mirror to the harassment she received as a small kid at school).
Gianda’s eight Italian cookbooks — two of which are New York Times number one best sellers — and line of children’s cookbooks prove that her influence cannot be denied.
MARTIN YAN
Martin Yan basically spent the first 30 years of his life mastering the art of Cantonese cuisine from Guangzhou to Kowloon to Hong Kong to UC Davis where he graduated with Masters in Food Science. Yeah, he’s a chef and a scientist. Yang started working in TV in the late 1970s and to date has produced and stared in 1,500 episodes of Yan Can Cook. That’s a feat deserving of endless praise right there.
Yang has also been instrumental with the widening influence of Cantonese cuisine with a chain of restaurants, cookery schools, over two dozen cookbooks, and multiple appearances on pretty much every cooking show ever. It could be argued with Yang’s rise Cantonese food went from being looked at as cheap chop suey houses in big city Chinatowns to a respected and integral part of American food culture. Today Yang is the elder ombudsmen of east Asian cuisine for American palates with his shows and cookbooks expanding from Canton to Vietnam, Philippines, and more.
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MARCUS SAMUELSSON
Marcus Samuelsson’s young life was disrupted by the Ethiopian Civil War and his mother’s subsequent death from tuberculosis. Samuelsson and his sister were sent as refugees to Sweden where they were adopted by a Swedish family. From there Samuelsson would eventually find cooking and immigrate to Switzerland and Austria before arriving on America’s shores. By the time he was 24 he was a head chef in New York City and was the youngest chef to receive three stars from the New York Times.
Since that point, Samuelsson has built a food empire that embraces soul food from Africa to Harlem and all of his stops along the way. The current count for his restaurants is eleven. He’s published seven cookbooks that highlight an immigrant’s journey into the world of cooking, food culture, and Americana. His story, which he chronicled in his James Beard award winning book Yes, Chef, is a beacon of hope for any child refugee or immigrant looking for a brighter future.
ROY CHOI
Roy Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea. He was only two when his parents moved him to southern California. Choi’s earliest and best memories are of his mom’s famous kimchee and making dumplings in one of his parent’s restaurant kitchens as a little boy. Cooking was always just a part of Choi’s life. He worked odd jobs in kitchens while trying college, and even teaching English back in Korea. It wasn’t until an obsession with Emeril Lagasse led Choi to pursue culinary school and he started working his way up the chef ladder at Hilton.
Then, in 2008, everything changed with the founding of Kogi. Choi and his business partners were instrumental in the exploding food truck scene in LA during the late aughts. The Kogi brand became massively famous for fusing Korean and Mexican flavors into delectable items you could eat with one hand while drinking a beer with the other. It’s hard now to think of time when food trucks weren’t ubiquitous — Choi is a big part turning the scene into a worldwide phenomenon.
Choi didn’t stop there, he’s teamed up with other chefs to open LocoL, which aims to provide healthier versions of fast food for affordable prices in low-income urban neighborhoods.
MICHAEL MINA
Michael Mina was born in Cairo, Egypt before his parents brought him to America in the early 1970s. Mina grew up surrounded by the farmlands of Washington in Ellensburg (about 100 miles east of Seattle). He started working in kitchens at 15. By the time he was 19 he was working in kitchens in New York City on the weekends while attending the CIA during the week. His drive was second to none as he pursued his dream of becoming a chef.
That determination led Mina to two dozen restaurants, cookbooks, a slew of Michelin stars, and a culinary empire of haute American cuisine, food truck treats, and everything in between. The sheer amount of people Mina employs at his restaurants — which span the whole country — is an impressive enough feat on its own. Yet Mina consistently keeps his game smooth and on the top. His determination has not slipped, he once lost a Michelin star at one of his San Francisco restaurants and devoted a year to earning it back, which he of course did.
WOLFGANG PUCK
We started with a baller legend, so let’s end with one. Wolfgang Puck is a straight up icon. He got his start in his mom’s kitchen in Austria and came up in the kitchens of Monaco before immigrating to America when he was 24. He wound up in LA in the 1970s where he fundamental to the rise of Alice Water’s California Cuisine movement of international dishes fused with local ingredients. Puck opened up the now legendary Spago, threw some salmon and caviar on a pizza and the rest, as they say, is history.
From Puck’s visionary beginning on LA’s scene, he’s parlayed his talents into too many restaurants to bother counting, boxed meals, schools, books, kitchen accessories, shows, and every facet of a full on culinary empire you can fathom. Hell, he even appeared on Frasier. We can’t imagine a better example of the American dream being executed by an immigrant than the unfettered and astronomical success of Wolfgang Puck.
