K is for Korean: Manifestations of Culinary Identity and Masculinity in Contemporary Korean American Chef Memoirs

While with the waves of K-Pop, K-Dramas, and K-Beauty products, Korean culture has gained popularity in the U.S., Korean culinary culture does not seem to have a substantial benefit from this visibility since Korean American culinary identity follows a different path. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, Korean American chefs contributed to American foodscape with the traditional food they had prepared at local restaurants, and cookbooks. In the 21st century, the rise of the foodie culture provides a fresh flow through which Korean American chefs have gained visibility in their restaurants, TV shows, and other culinary platforms. Meanwhile, Korean American chefs heva started to publish memoirs as a reflection of their culinary identity. The memoirs provide a broader perspective on transformation of Korean American culinary culture and culinary identity. The chefs, although their approaches to memoir as a genre differ from one another, adopt food memoirs as an expressive medium to reflect not only what they encounter behind the doors of the industrial kitchens but also their requiem for a sense of cultural belonging, individual expression, and culinary subjectivity. Within this framework, this paper concentrates on memoirs written by contemporary Korean American chefs including Roy Choi’s L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food (2013), Edward Lee’s Buttermilk Graffiti (2018), and David Chang’s Eat a Peach (2020). The article aims to answer how the contemporary chefs construct their culinary subjectivity in relation to the Korean American culinary culture and the U.S. culinary framework. This work also tries to intrigue how Korean American chefs envision contemporary chef 92 identity with a specific focus on its intersections with ethnicity and culinary masculinity.