43: Kevin Pang
Source: ChicagoMag
About Kevin
Kevin Pang is an author, journalist, magician, little league baseball umpire, producer, theater music director, award-winning filmmaker, cooking show host, and of course, foodie of the highest caliber (with a James Beard award to prove it).
An eclectic mix of adventures, yes. But it’s not all that surprising when you unroll the scroll that is Kevin’s life. In fact, the trajectory starts to make sense when you dig deeper.
Born in Hong Kong, Kevin immigrated with his parents to the US at age 6. To call his relationship with his dad strained would be an understatement. Kevin embraced Western culture while his parents were firmly rooted in the Eastern way of life, with no interest in assimilating. This “dual cultural experience,” to put it mildly, gave rise to dual identities: Kevin was, in his own words, American during the day and Chinese after school. The arguing and fights with his dad were constant, ranging from smoldering embers to full-fledged conflagrations.
The Eastern cultures put a high emphasis on respect for elders, but Kevin was recalcitrant, insistent on doing things his own way, from refusing to speak Cantonese to bleaching his hair blond, an act that elicited fury from his dad, who accused him of being ashamed of his Chinese heritage.
Kevin was raised in Toronto and Seattle, working at the Pike’s Place Fish Market in high school. After moving to the Windy City, he worked as a metro reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Meanwhile, the relationship with his dad, now 2,000 miles away, was barely aglow, kept alive through a weekly phone call filled with the most superficial of pleasantries and small talk.
Everything changed when Kevin was offered a position on the paper’s food writing staff. He had zero experience, except for one highly qualifying line item: he was Cantonese, steeped in the region’s food-centric philosophy and a deep (though perhaps dormant) love of cooking. And this would be the key to unlock not just his future career, but transform his relationship with his dad.
Jeffrey Pang had an obsession with food that was at once borderline manic and completely culturally acceptable. And after Kevin became a food writer, he and his father, for the first time ever, shared a mutual interest. The weekly phone calls evolved from weather forecasts to deep and analogy-drenched tutorials on the way a shu mai’s wrapper should caress its filling or the proper way to braise pork belly. 5 minute calls regularly stretched to 30 minutes.
After his father started making cooking videos on YouTube, Kevin was shocked to learn that not only did his parents have a loyal audience, their viewer metrics were impressive. But the coup de grace to their fraught relationship came when Kevin learned why his father started to make the videos: it was for Kevin, for when his parents were no longer around to prepare the dishes for him. And so, as the family recipes migrated from the carefully maintained spiral notebook to the world of online content, so did Kevin’s relationship with his dad level up.
Meanwhile, Kevin continued channeling his energy into his culinary pursuits, co-directing the critically acclaimed film For Grace, which follows brilliant but tormented chef Curtis Duffy in the months leading up to the opening of his first restaurant Grace, which would go on to earn three Michelin stars; creating and running the Onion’s food spinoff The Takeout; and joining America’sTest Kitchen as editorial director and co-host of the Hunger Pangs cooking show, a duty he gladly shares with his dad.
And, almost as a bow on their converging character arcs, Kevin and his dad are releasing a cookbook of Cantonese cuisine entitled “A Very Chinese Cookbook,” out on October 24th of this year.
Writing a book is hard, and although it’s bound to do well considering the following of its authors, my sense is that if you ask Kevin what he really thinks, he’d tell you that just being back in the kitchen with his dad made the whole thing worth it.