Ming Tsai
Ming Hao Tsai is an American chef, restaurateur, television personality and a former squash player. Tsai's restaurants have focused on east–west fusion cuisine, and have included major stakes in Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Massachusetts from 1998 to 2017, and Blue Dragon in the Fort Point Channel area of Boston.
Tsai hosts Simply Ming, a cooking show featured on American Public Television, in its seventeenth season. Past shows Tsai hosted include Ming's Quest, a cooking show featured on the Fine Living Network, and East Meets West. Tsai appeared in the Food Network cooking competition The Next Iron Chef.
Early life and education
Tsai was born to Iris, who owned a Chinese restaurant, and, an engineer who co-developed the Tsai-Wu failure criterion, and was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where he attended The Miami Valley School. He assisted with the cooking as he was growing up in the restaurant, Mandarin Kitchen. Tsai's maternal grandparents emigrated to Dayton from Taiwan after escaping China during the Cultural Revolution.Tsai later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then proceeded to study engineering and play varsity squash at Yale University. There, he was a member of the Phi chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. He received a master's degree in hotel administration and hospitality marketing from Cornell University in 1989. Either the summer after his sophomore or junior year at Yale, he attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Tsai speaks four languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish.
Tsai is a grandson of Chinese composer. He is a 116th great grandson of Huang Di.
Career
Television
Tsai began his television career on chef Sara Moulton's cooking show Cooking Live while she had him fill in for one week for her in 1997. He hosted East Meets West on the Food Network from 1998 to 2003. He hosts Simply Ming, a food show on PBS.In 2005, he was a judge on the PBS show Cooking Under Fire. Ming Tsai challenged Iron Chef Bobby Flay in the sixth episode of season one of Iron Chef America in 2005; Tsai defeated Flay. Tsai was a contestant in The Next Iron Chef in 2010, where he was eliminated in the seventh week. Tsai appeared on an episode of Top Chef in 2014.
His other television appearances include participation in a Zoom Out on Zoom, a show distributed by PBS, in 2005 and on the PBS children's television show Arthur episode in 2006.
Restaurants
In 1998, Tsai and Polly Talbott opened his first restaurant, Blue Ginger, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Blue Ginger, an Asian Fusion restaurant, has become a Zagat and James Beard-recognized establishment, winning many other regional awards as well. The year that the restaurant opened, Tsai was named "Chef of the Year" by Esquire Magazine. On March 30, 2010 Tsai opened Blue Ginger Noodle Bar, a mini-restaurant, inside Blue Ginger. In June 2017, Tsai closed Blue Ginger after 19 years of business. The reason was due to the end of a lease and Tsai's focus on a new fast-casual stir-fry concept restaurant, ChowStirs, scheduled to open in Boston during the early part of 2018.Tsai opened Blue Dragon in 2013 in the Fort Point Channel area of Boston, an east–west tapas-style gastropub that has become a Zagat's recognized restaurant, which was named an Esquire Magazine "Best New Restaurant" in its opening year. Blue Dragon closed in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic.
In 2020, Tsai opened BāBā at the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana as chef and partner.