Eddie Huang is a major player in the rise of Asian American cooking. While the story of his life and his impact of his restaurant has been told in a fictionalized TV Series and a book, I found this summary of his experiences as he rose in prominence to be fascinating. It’s worth reading especially if like me, you haven’t read his book or followed his blog.
To put his account in context, consider the situation of Asian American food before the 2000’s. I have mentioned in previous posts that the only place you could get Asian food was in urban Asian ethnic neighborhoods. Growing up, we would have to go to Oakland Chinatown to get Asian vegetables or Asian food. Filipino restaurants were few and far between, requiring a trip to far off Daly City or South San Francisco. Authentic Chinese restaurants could only be experienced in the Bay Area’s Chinatowns. Taiwanese food was generally unknown.
Reading Huang’s story, I didn’t know about his general thuggish behavior as a young man. To me, that makes his rise to influence even more impressive. He began using the term Gua Bao for the buns he sold, a name that is now used widely. Taiwanese food seems to be everywhere these days, from countless Boba shops to Taiwanese beef noodle soup places.
I have touched on some aspects of Huang’s story, but definitely not everything. At the end his story, he mentions multiple Asian American restaurants in with multiple origins (from Thai to Filipino, among others) that he finds notable. If you want to see what those are, check out the article in Eater.
(photo credit: May S. Young licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)
