Food content creator Jon Kung (also known as @jonkung on TikTok) created an online presence through his expertise as a culinary professional, but he is known for his unique recipes developed around what he calls “third culture cooking.”
“Third culture cooking is pretty much a creative by-product of being a person or third culture. It’s a combination of food we ate at home with families and food in the home where we lived,” Kung told Spoon University. “It’s often informed by nostalgia and a combination of things we learned to love through exposure and lived experience.”
As a former professional chef, Kung currently cooks up dishes on TikTok to teach about his favorite foods, which combine traditional Chinese recipes with recipes from other cultures. From Hong Kong chicken and waffles to spaghetti and lion’s head meatballs, he isn’t afraid to combine the most unexpected dishes into something new and delicious.
Kung originally started in the cuisine industry 12 years ago when he started doing food pop-ups in Detroit. After the pandemic closed down his pop-up, he transitioned to social media to promote this creative style of cooking and even developed a cookbook with over 100 of his favorite recipes. The recipes range from what he’s coined a “mad-libs” of multiple cuisines, tying traditional Chinese foundational recipes with cuisines from many other countries. Following the launch of his cookbook last year, Kung is continuing to create content on social media and shifting gears, interviewing other chefs in the industry for more variety on his page. As Kung makes this social media transition, we caught up with him to learn more about his inspiration for his recipes, his cookbook, and his content.
Spoon University: What was the process of developing recipes for your cookbook and social media?
JK: My inspiration comes from film, art gallery, mad-libs with dishes, blank a la blank, and often one too many glasses of wine. One thing I try not to do is to take inspiration from other people’s cooking. My inspiration comes from any avenue which is not food. I only follow trends for the sake of the algorithm but I hope to take inspiration from other places. When I go and try a dish with a culture I have no experience with and it reminds me of a Chinese preparation, I try to find the middle ground between both dishes. It can be recognizable by both cultures but something completely different.
SU: What’s your inspiration for TikTok content and how is that different from your previous work as a pop-up chef?
JK: Usually, it’s replacing all components of other cuisine with Asian preparation. It’s [third culture cuisine] something we’ve been doing, but now we are sharing it. I found success with cooking on social media. After shutting down the pop-up and moving to TikTok creation, it’s sad. I don’t see people eating my food [in real life anymore], but I like the teacher role I’ve stepped into as a TikTok chef.
SU: What is your favorite cuisine you have experimented with?
JK: Chinese and Italian go very well together and surprisingly there are some similarities with Nigerian dishes. Also, there are middle grounds with a lot of East Asian cuisines. I like to find common themes within our own cuisine and then combine the two to make something unique.
SU: What kind of recipes can we find in your cookbook?
JK: It’s called “Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen: A Cookbook.” It has recipes that revolve around Chinese American food. All the dishes are third culture cooking. The beginning is foundational elements of Chinese cooking and the last chapter is using those foundational elements with other countries including American, Australian, Canada, Japanese, Korean and Italian cuisine. In total it’s about 120 recipes.
SU: What’s next for your career?
JK: I’m working on an interview series for chefs and talking to them about their work. I already have one on my YouTube and one’s on deck for editing. I’m looking forward to doing more of sharing my platform with other people in the industry. For all intents and purposes, I’m retired as a professional cook, and this is one way to stay and keep tabs with the industry.
You can keep up with Jon Kung on TikTok, and check out “Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen: A Cookbook” on Amazon.