Fresh Off the Boat

Starred review from October 29, 2012
Huang, the founder of the popular East Village food shop Baohaus, tells his unconventional immigrant fable with his FOB (“fresh off the boat”) parents and his unusual relatives living the Yankee dream. He traces his food jones to his father’s restaurant in Orlando, Fla., wrestling with his Chinese identity, while embracing a love of old school hip-hop, Michael Jackson, Charles Barkley, and Jonathan Swift’s satirical “A Modest Proposal.” Writing with attitude, Huang details his journey from novice cook sampling Haitian ribs, Southern cooking, Japanese Izakaya wings, Bon Chon Korean fried chicken, and Taiwanese foods to opening his landmark eatery known for its fashionable, simple Asian street food. “I grew up in the excess of the Brat Pack–Madonna–Joe Montana–Michael Jackson 80s and the NWA–MJ–Nirvana–World Wide Web nineties, and we saw the residual battles from seminal cases like Roe v. Wade or Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,” Huang writes. Brash, leading-edge, and unapologetically hip, Huang reconfigures the popular foodie memoir into something worthwhile and very memorable.

February 1, 2013
Up-and-coming celebrity chef Huang serves up a raw memoir recounting his life as an angry young man chafing under generations of stifling Chinese tradition and all-encompassing American "whiteness." Three things inform the multitalented restaurateur's identity: food, basketball and hip-hop. Although not necessarily in that order, each is infused in virtually every sentence, many of which are laugh-out-loud funny. All three provided the socially conscious author with the succor he needed to make it as an Asian "OutKast" growing up in the Deep South. The son of a former Taiwanese gangster father and a money-obsessed mother, Huang spent his formative years posting up with his style-obsessed buddies and generally bucking authority and the status quo. The author renders his portraits of his many colorful friends and family as vividly and spectacularly as his recipe for beef noodle soup. Huang may have an opinion on everything from religion to RZA, but his deeply contemplative nature deflects any accusations of self-righteousness. His history of violence is more problematic, however. Physical violence both on the streets and inside the home punctuated the author's younger years, and while the latter is thoughtfully unpacked and explored, the former is too often glorified. It could have all easily gone quite differently for Huang. At one point, he was arrested after driving a car into a crowd of threatening rivals and was packed off to Taiwan in order to escape punishment. However, he used the opportunity to reconcile his Asian heritage and focus his unrelenting energy on the things he really wanted out of life. The inspiring result became his trendsetting East Village eatery, Baohaus. A unique voice with a provocative point of view.

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December 1, 2012
Born in the U.S. to Taiwanese immigrant parents, Huang refuses to be a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling, and his colloquial, furious memoir is as open about his struggling, screaming, sometimes abusive parents as it is about the prejudice he encounters growing up in Orlando and then in New York, where to this day someone tells me to go back to China at least three times a year. He hates that everything he does is a statement about his people and where they are from, even as he refuses to be reformed, assimilated, apologetic. Always refusing to fit in, he wants to hurt people like they hurt him, and he succeeds. Now he runs a big New York City gourmet restaurant and a food store, and, throughout the book, food is front and center, including his mother's recipe for the best beef noodle soup. Readers will leave hungry, and many immigrants will recognize the refusal to go with the model minority myth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)