As we’ve written previously, the ‘celebrity chef’ has existed in one form or another for a
Ken Hom and his wok
hundred years or more but, for U.K. audiences at least, one of the first introductions to this culinary species was Ken Hom, the American born Chinese chef who began to appear on British television in 1984. He seemed to appear from nowhere at the time but was in fact the result of a two-year BBC television search for someone to host a daytime Chinese cookery show.
Ken Hom was bron in Tuscon, Arizona in 1949 and raised by his mother after his father died when he was just a baby. He says that he began to work at his uncle’s Chinese restaurant in Arizona when he was eleven years old, learning the basics of Chinese cookery. When he was old enough to go to university, he left behind the cookery to study the History of Art at the University of California but a need for extra income led him to teach, of all things, Italian cooking classes. He was soon teaching Chinese cookery and in 1977 he joined the new California Culinary Academy in San Francisco as an instructor.
San Francisco was where he stayed until 1982 when the BBC came calling; the resulting TV show was Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery and proved a huge success. A book to accompany the show is still in print now and has sold more then 1.5 million copies. This series was followed by other equally successful shows, notably Ken Hom’s Hot Wok. These early series arguably set the scene for the popularity of Chinese food in the U.K. and a Ken Hom branded wok has sold millions around the world.
The books and the series continued and Ken Hom now lives in France but frequently visits Bangkok where he has a restaurant, Maison Chin. He has received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University but his biggest legacy must be his contribution to the promotion of Chinese food in the U.K. Check out his first BBC show: