About ten years ago, I was not in a good place. My then-boyfriend/now-husband was living in another city seven hours away. My stepmother had just died in a car wreck, leaving my 12-year-old sister and my father, already widowed once when my mother died. To add to all that, I had been living with my 80-year-old grandmother and right after my stepmother died, my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had to have surgery. I was pretty much the only one left to try to hold the family together. All this and also trying to work forty hours a week.
By the end of the day, after cooking dinner, putting my sister and grandmother to bed, trying to clean house, doing clothes, and preparing lunch for my sister and grandmother for the next day, I usually dropped in bed very exhausted. But, when your mind is going go quickly, it is hard to just fall asleep. So, I’d turn on the television and watch my comfort show – East Meets West with Ming Tsai.
Now a cooking show might not seem like comfort television, but it certainly was for me. Ming grew up in his family’s Chinese restaurant, Mandarin Kitchen, in Dayton, OH. He obtained a mechanical engineering degree from Yale, but ended up in Paris at Cordon Bleu to study cooking. He came back to the U.S. and got a master’s degree in Hotel Administration and Hospitality Marketing from Cornell University. He worked for several years as a food and beverage director in Chicago, but he was eventually lured back to the kitchen in 1992.
He worked as a sous chef at Silks in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco. The restaurant served east-west food, which would become Ming’s signature. He served as executive chef at Ginger Club and Santacafe before deciding to move back east to open his own restaurant. He chose to open Blue Ginger in Boston. In 1998 and it remains successful to this day.
In addition to his successful restaurant, Ming has also appeared in many magazines such as USA Today, The New York Times, and Food & Wine. He was named Chef of the Year by Esquire Magazine in 1998. He has hosted three television shows, including my favorite East Meets West with Ming Tsai, Simply Ming, and Ming’s Quest. Recently, Ming appeared on another favorite show of mine – Iron Chef America. He took on my favorite Iron Chef Morimoto and – gasp – beat him! What can you do when your two favorite chefs go head to head?