John Kung, the Detroit-based chef who made waves during the pandemic, didn’t rise to TikTok stardom through the usual dance and lip-sync routines favored by most influencers on the platform. Instead, he gained fame through his deep-rooted passion for cooking, and more specifically for “third culture cuisine.”
With more than 1.7 million followers on TikTok and 267,000 followers on Instagram, Kun’s cooking tutorials are imaginative, executed in a witty and charming way, and are nostalgic, combining his Chinese heritage with his upbringing in the United States and Canada. There are also many delicious dishes.
Some culinary traditionalists may frown at the mention of unconventional dishes like curry mac and cheese, dang dang lasagna, and Faygo orange chicken., These gastronomic creations are likely to resonate deeply with a particular audience: “third culture kids,” or people whose lives have been shaped by different cultures.
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Born in Los Angeles, raised in Hong Kong and Toronto, and currently residing in Detroit, Kun’s journey exemplifies this multicultural and multicuisine fusion. His upbringing influences the recipes in his cookbooks. Kun Food: Chinese-American Recipes from the Third Culture Kitchen.
Ms. Kun, 39, spent her childhood in Hong Kong, then returned to Hong Kong to spend the last two years of her high school education at an international school, before returning to the United States to study theater and creative writing and law at Eastern Michigan University. . She is at the University of Detroit Mercy.
“I taught myself how to cook at the same time I was attending law school. Cooking was the only creative outlet that took me away from studying and felt justified in doing so,” he says. says.
But Kun was also starting to miss Hong Kong food. “Detroit at the time, and to some extent still today, was very lacking in the kind of food that I missed in Hong Kong,” he says. “That was my motivation as well.”
When Kun first started scrolling through TikTok, he mostly found videos of people dancing and doing voiceovers. But over time, he says, people started talking about politics and news. Then came the new coronavirus infection. and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“That’s when I realized that somehow, there was going to be a huge cultural shift that was inaccurate. Then we went into lockdown. And the people who were on TikTok, which wasn’t under protest, were far more Being young, we didn’t express how scared we were and how scary the situation was because during the lockdown we were all scared. None of us knew what was going to happen. So I thought, what can I do to help?”
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Kun acted quickly. “I thought, ‘I can teach people to cook.'” He could teach people how to stretch a can of beans. I was able to teach people how to get all the leftovers out of their refrigerators, how to butcher chickens and process them into things like chicken breasts, chicken thighs, chicken broth, and bones. ”
As his videos started gaining attention, his profile was picked up by a company called Funimation. “I got my first brand deal through them, and I got my IGTV miniseries through them. At the time, I was making more money in a few months as a cook in Detroit than he did in a year. I noticed.”
This moment marked a turning point in Kun’s career. “I realized this was a career, and I guess the rest is history,” he says.
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Two years later, Kun Food: Chinese-American Recipes from the Third Culture Kitchen Freed. “I’ve worked hard and I’m very proud of it,” he says. “I thought I’d be like Stephen King, stuck in a snowy cabin all winter, drinking all the wine,” he jokes.
In fact, he was juggling various commitments, including maintaining a presence on TikTok and starting a YouTube channel.
One of his “unconventional” recipes will resonate with Hong Kong audiences thanks to his take on the traditional lion’s head meatballs served with spaghetti. “We also know that Hong Kong has a special relationship with spaghetti. Restaurants like Spaghetti House and wok-fried Filipino spaghetti were popular dishes in Hong Kong from the ’80s to his ’90s,” he said. say.
Another recipe Kung mentions is Hong Kong-style chicken and waffles. Instead of Western-style waffles, Guidanzaialso known as egg waffles, contain bite-sized pieces of chicken.
As Kuhn notes in the foreword to his cookbook, although he essentially creates “fusion” cuisine, the expression of that style has been confused and mishandled. This term has become a dirty word.
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“I don’t know if third culture creativity has permeated the zeitgeist of Hong Kong as a whole, but it’s starting to take hold here,” he says. “Fusion is often associated with superficiality, especially when it comes to the fusion of East and West, but third culture cuisine is predicated on full immersion in different cultures, thereby allowing each culture to be fully immersed. It gives you access to certain kinds of nuances that you can appreciate.”
Kun’s next trick is still in the works. “I have some dream formats that I would like to experiment with. It could be a graphic novel cookbook, or it could be a book that focuses on food and nutrition from the side of cooking and enjoying Chinese food,” he said. “Of course I’ll make more videos.”