Edward Lee

Edward Lee is a Korean-American chef, restaurateur and writer, born in Brooklyn, New York, to Korean immigrant parents in 1972. He grew up in Canarsie, attended Tilden High School, and went on to study English literature at New York University. After college he worked briefly in publishing before training as a chef in New York kitchens including Bouley.

In 2002 he opened Clay in New York's East Village, a Korean restaurant that closed during the post-9/11 downturn. In 2003, while traveling to the Kentucky Derby, he met Kevin McCardy, the then-owner of 610 Magnolia in the Old Louisville neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, and ended up taking over the restaurant. The unlikely fit — a Brooklyn-born Korean-American running a fine-dining restaurant in Kentucky — became the entire frame of his cooking: dishes that brought together the smoky, slow-cooked, bourbon-soaked Southern tradition with the chile, fermentation and ssam wraps of Korean cooking. Pickled-watermelon kimchi, smoked-pork-belly bo ssäm, country-ham fried rice, bourbon-marinated short ribs.

610 Magnolia, with Lee as chef-owner, became one of the most-discussed restaurants in the American South over the following two decades. He went on to open MilkWood in Louisville (closed 2017), Whiskey Dry in Louisville, and Succotash in Maryland and Washington, D.C. (with Knead Hospitality and Design). He has been a finalist for the James Beard Best Chef Southeast award multiple times, and his book Smoke and Pickles (2013) won the IACP Best American Cookbook Award.

He is also a prolific writer and television figure: his memoir Buttermilk Graffiti (2018) won the James Beard Award for Best Book about Food, and he has appeared as a contestant on Top Chef and as a judge on multiple food shows. In 2020 he founded the LEE Initiative (Let's Empower Employment), which has run national restaurant-worker relief programmes during and after the pandemic and continues to fund culinary scholarships for women and minorities.