The Asian American Chefs Rewriting Fine Dining

Fine dining in America has been quietly and significantly reshaped by Asian American chefs over the past two decades. The transformation did not happen through a single moment of recognition — though the James Beard Awards, the Michelin Guide, and the World’s 50 Best have all provided those moments — but through the sustained work of chefs who trained in the established fine dining tradition and then built something that tradition had not previously made room for. These are the Asian American chefs rewriting fine dining right now, and what they have built is already permanent.

Niki Nakayama — n/naka, Los Angeles

Niki Nakayama opened n/naka in the Palms neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2011 and spent the following decade building one of the most sought-after reservations in the country — a thirteen-course modern kaiseki menu rooted in Japanese culinary tradition and California seasonality. The restaurant held two Michelin stars and was named one of the thirty best restaurants in the world by Food and Wine. Nakayama is one of the only known female chefs to run a kaiseki-dedicated kitchen — a form historically dominated by men — and she runs it with her wife, Carole Iida-Nakayama, who serves as sous chef and partner. Their Netflix Chef’s Table episode introduced Nakayama to a global audience. In 2022, they opened N/Soto, a more casual izakaya in West Adams, proving that the kaiseki discipline was a foundation for expansion rather than a limitation.

Junghyun Park — Atomix, New York City

Junghyun Park and his wife Ellia Park opened Atomix in New York’s Flatiron District in 2018 and earned two Michelin stars within two years. The restaurant presents Korean cuisine as a tasting menu experience of the same caliber as the best European fine dining — not as an approximation of European technique applied to Korean ingredients, but as a Korean fine dining tradition with its own rigor and vocabulary. Each course arrives with a card contextualizing the dish within Korean culinary history. The Parks also run Atoboy, a more accessible Korean banchan restaurant, and Naro, a wood-fired concept. Together they have built the most coherent Korean American fine dining operation in the country.

Brandon Jew — Mister Jiu’s, San Francisco

Brandon Jew opened Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 2016 in a space that had been a banquet restaurant for decades. The restaurant serves contemporary Chinese American cuisine — Cantonese tradition reimagined through California ingredients and modern technique — and earned a Michelin star and a James Beard Award for Best Chef: California. Jew grew up in San Francisco’s Chinese American community and trained at the highest levels of the American restaurant industry before returning to Chinatown with something the neighborhood had not seen before: fine dining that took its Chinese American inheritance as seriously as any other influence. Mister Jiu’s physical location — in the heart of a Chinatown facing decades of disinvestment — is itself a statement about where fine dining belongs.

Edward Lee — 610 Magnolia, Louisville

Edward Lee has built one of the most interesting culinary careers in the country from Louisville, Kentucky — not a city on the standard fine dining circuit. His restaurant 610 Magnolia serves a Southern Korean American cuisine that is genuinely his own: collard greens braised with kimchi, country ham with gochujang, cooking that makes sense only when you understand that Lee grew up in Brooklyn in a Korean family and then fell in love with the American South. He has written extensively about the overlaps between Korean and Southern food culture, and the thinking behind his cooking makes his restaurants richer experiences for it.

Kristen Kish — Chef and Host

Kristen Kish was born in South Korea and adopted by a white family in Michigan at four months old. She won Top Chef Season Ten, ran the kitchen at Stir in Boston under Barbara Lynch, and became the host of Top Chef after Padma Lakshmi’s departure. She has used her platform to speak consistently about what it means to be Korean American in an industry that spent decades treating Asian identity as interchangeable. Her cooking and her public presence have made her one of the most visible Asian American chefs in the country.

The James Beard Foundation has tracked the increasing recognition of Asian American chefs across its awards categories over the past decade, reflecting a culinary landscape that looks significantly different than it did twenty years ago. Read more: James Beard Foundation Awards.