Ken Hom

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Ken Hom (born May 3, 1949 in Tucson, Arizona) is a notable Chinese American chef. Raised in Chicago, Illinois by his widowed mother, he first learned cooking at age eleven when he worked in his uncle's Chinese restaurant. He went out to California for college, receiving a History of Art degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ironically, it was his art studies – and Italian cooking – that started him on his career path: in 1974, returning to Berkeley from a study trip to Europe, he was invited to earn some money by teaching at a weekend cooking course on Italian cooking, where he taught the participants how to make their own pasta. This led to an invitation to come back and teach Chinese cooking, and soon he was earning money by giving cooking lessons from his Berkeley apartment, leading in 1977 to his joining San Francisco's new California Culinary Academy as an instructor.

In 1984, the BBC asked him to star in a new TV series on Chinese cooking, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery. The success of this program led to subsequent series, best-selling cookbooks accompanying the series, and restaurants (including the Imperial City restaurant and the Yellow River Café chain in the UK. He also does restaurant and food consultancy, including for Cathay Pacific airlines and The Peninsula in Hong Kong).

In 1998, deciding that he was more famous in Europe than in his native U.S., Hom moved to the United Kingdom where he soon launched a cookery utensils and wok range to which he lend his name, popular with the giant supermarket chain Sainsbury's. He now splits his time between London and southwestern France while retaining a flat as an occasional base in Hong-Kong.