Chef to the Stars — Jack Lee

Metro Writers founder Michael Arnold first met Jack Lee while featuring him for Oi Vietnam magazine, in the years when the Metro Writers project was just beginning. He came away from that interview convinced that Jack’s story demanded a book – not just because of where Jack had ended up, but because of the juxtaposition of comedy and darkness behind how he had got there.

The book was written in English by NPD Khanh, a gifted Saigon-based author who brought to Jack’s anecdotes the literary touch they deserved. The Vietnamese edition was published in 2016 by Thanh Niên Publishing House as Đầu Bếp Của Những Ngôi Sao and became a significant publication in Jack’s Vietnamese career, introducing his story to a country he had left as a boy and returned to as a celebrity chef.

Metro Writers produced the English edition in 2020, making Jack’s story accessible to international readers and establishing the book as a credential that travels with him in both markets. The book includes recipes served by Chef Jack to his Hollywood clients. For Jack, the biography has become a key asset in a dual career, communicating his stature to Vietnamese audiences unfamiliar with his Hollywood years while establishing his origin story for international audiences who know him as a chef but not as a former refugee boy from Saigon’s Chinatown.

Chef to the Stars was Metro Writers’ first book, and the project that demonstrated what the company was capable of – taking a compelling Vietnamese life story and making it readable, publishable, and available to the world.

From a fishing boat off the coast of Vietnam to the kitchens of Hollywood – set in book form for maximum impact.

Jack Lee grew up in Saigon’s Chinatown cooking at his mother’s side until, at the age of ten, he was bundled onto an illegal fishing boat heading out to sea with no explanation. He spent the next several decades in the United States, where life handed him a procession of failures that should have finished him: a hostile family, a collapsed medical degree, a riot that destroyed his aunt’s business, a brush with organised crime, and a business deal killed in one morning by the September 11 attacks.

What he became instead was the banquet chef at the Hotel Bel-Air – the most prestigious kitchen in Hollywood – and the personal caterer to Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand, Quincy Jones, and the royal family of Brunei, among many others. He went on to cater the Oscars, all before faced with the most ridiculous of setbacks – the loss of his sense of taste after surgery.

Chef to the Stars is the biography of Jack Lee: equal parts tragicomedy and triumph, and one of the most improbable success stories to come out of the Vietnamese diaspora in America. It is also, somewhere inside it, a love letter to the flavours of a Saigon childhood that no amount of hardship could entirely extinguish.