Grace Young

Grace Young is an award-winning cookbook author, culinary historian, and filmmaker who has built her career around preserving and celebrating Chinese cuisine in America. She has written award-winning cookbooks and cultural histories, recorded widely-viewed wok demonstrations, and has taken on an entirely new and unexpected role as an advocate fiercely fighting for the survival of Chinatowns across the country.

When Covid shuttered businesses and slowed foot traffic in Chinatowns across the U.S., and anti-Asian hate crimes spiked, Young began documenting these events and launched a fund to support Manhattan's Chinatown. Her video series, "Coronavirus: Chinatown Stories," portrays the toll of the pandemic on New York City’s Chinese community. She partnered with the James Beard Foundation for a #SaveChineseRestaurants campaign, drawing support for local restaurants through exposure and patronage; she later collaborated again with the James Beard Foundation and Poster House museum on the #LoveAAPI social media campaign to fight anti-Asian hate. Her advocacy for Chinatown and AAPI mom-and-pop businesses has been profiled on national television and radio programs as well as in newspapers and other print media too numerous to mention.

Overall, Young is a three-time James Beard Award-winner and a six-time IACP Award-winner, including the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a 2023 Forbes 50 Over 50 honoree, and is the recipient of the Julia Child Award, the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year Award and a USA Today Women of the Year honoree for her work to save America’s Chinatowns. In 2022, Young was also honored as one of EatingWell’s American Food Heroes.

Named the “poet laureate of the wok” by food historian Betty Fussell, Young has devoted her career to demystifying the ancient cooking utensil for use in contemporary kitchens. She is the co-founder of "Wok Wednesdays," an online stir-fry-wok cooking group, and has taught healthy stir-frying in cooking schools and spas throughout the U.S. She was a guest curator for "The Breath of a Wok" exhibition at New York University’s Asian Pacific American Gallery. Young received the James Beard Foundation’s 2021 Digital Media Award, as well as a Webby Award nomination, for her video comedy "Wok Therapist."

Throughout her long career, Young has been a guest lecturer at culinary institutes, museums and corporations; appeared as a guest on cooking shows such as "Martha Stewart Show"; and contributed work to publications such as Cook’s Illustrated, Vogue, Bon Appétit, theKitchn, Chow, Food & Wine, and Gourmet. For seventeen years, she was the Test Kitchen Director and Director of Food Photography for over forty cookbooks published by Time-Life Books. Her career began in college, when she worked for a recipe developer and landed a job in the General Foods test kitchen.

Young currently serves on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Kitchen Cabinet, an advisory board made up of leaders in food scholarship and culinary history to help the museum shape and expand its research, collections, programs, and exhibitions related to food and beverage history. She previously served on the James Beard Foundation’s Book Awards Committee and was a contributing editor to Saveur magazine.