Kung Food: Inside TikTok star Jon Kung’s ‘third-culture cooking’ recipe book - Style

Jon Kung, the Detroit-based chef who went viral during the pandemic, didn’t ascend to TikTok stardom through the usual dance or lip-synch routines favoured by most influencers on the platform. Instead, he found fame through cooking – more specifically, his deep-seated passion for “third culture cuisine”.

With over 1.7 million followers on TikTok and 267,000 followers on Instagram, Kung’s cooking tutorials are imaginative and performed in a witty and engaging way, with often nostalgic dishes that combine his Chinese heritage with his American and Canadian upbringing.

Jon Kung’s Jerk Chow Mein

While some culinary traditionalists might raise an eyebrow at the mention of unconventional dishes like curry mac and cheese, dan dan lasagne or Faygo orange chicken, these gastronomic creations are likely to resonate profoundly with a particular audience: “third culture kids” – people whose lives have been shaped by a number of cultures.

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Born in Los Angeles, raised in Hong Kong and Toronto, and currently living in Detroit, Kung’s journey embodies this multicultural – and multi-culinary – mélange. His upbringing informs the recipes that fill his cookbook, Kung Food: Chinese-American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen.

Jon Kung’s Kung Food: Chinese-American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen

Kung, 39, spent his early years in Hong Kong and later returned to the city for the final two years of his high school education at an international school, before moving back to the US to study theatre and creative writing at Eastern Michigan University and law at University of Detroit Mercy.

“I taught myself how to cook at the same time that I was in law school,” he says, “Cooking was the only creative outlet that I felt justified in doing that took me away from my studies.”

But Kung was also beginning to miss Hong Kong’s cuisine. “Detroit at the time, and to an extent now, severely lacked the kind of food I was missing from Hong Kong,” he says. “So that was also my motivation”.

Jon Kung’s Faygo Orange Chicken

When Kung first started scrolling through TikTok, he mainly found videos of people dancing and doing voice-overs. But over time, he says, people started to talk more about politics and news. Then came Covid-19. And the Black Lives Matter movement.

“This is when I realised there was going to be a huge inaccurate cultural change in some way, shape or form. Then we went into lockdown. And the people who had been on TikTok that were not under the protest, were so much younger, so they weren’t expressing how afraid they were and how like scary the situation was. Because during lockdown, we were all terrified. None of us knew what was going to happen. So I was like, what can I do to help?”

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Kung acted fast. “I thought, ‘I can teach people how to cook. I could teach people how to stretch a can of beans. I could teach people how to take all of the leftovers in their fridge, teach them how to break down the chicken, to turn it into chicken breasts, chicken thighs, chicken soup, the bones.”

Jon Kung’s Hong Kong Borscht

As his videos began to gain traction, his profile got picked up by a company called Funimation. “I got my first brand deal through them, and I got an IGTV miniseries through them. I realised at that time, I had made more through them in a couple of months than I had made in an entire year as a line cook in Detroit.”

It was this moment that marked a turning point in Kung’s career. “I realised – this is a career. And I guess the rest is history,” he says.

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Two years later, Kung Food: Chinese-American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen was released. “I’m very proud because I worked my butt off for it,” he says, “But I also felt like I was a little bit robbed of the experience of what I envisioned being a writer to be romantically. I was thinking I’d be like Stephen King locked away in a cabin during winter in the snow, drunk off wine all the time,” he jokes.

Jon Kung’s Nasi Goreng

In reality, he was juggling many different commitments including maintaining his TikTok presence and starting a YouTube channel.

One of his “novelty” recipes will resonate with a Hong Kong audience thanks to his take on the traditional lion’s head meatball, which is served on spaghetti. “I know Hong Kong also has like a special relationship with spaghetti, with restaurants like Spaghetti House and wok-fried Filipino spaghetti, which was a fad dish in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s,” he says.

Another recipe Kung mentions is Hong Kong-style chicken and waffles. Instead of using Western-style waffles, he uses gai dan zai, aka egg waffles, with bite-sized chicken bites.

Jon Kung’s Hong Kong Chicken and Waffles

As Kung mentions in the introduction of his cookbook, while he is essentially crafting “fusion” cuisine, the term has become a dirty word due to some confused or poorly handled representations of the style.

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“I’m not sure if third-culture creativity has penetrated the zeitgeist of Hong Kong in general, but here it’s starting to take hold,” he says. “While fusion has been associated with being superficial – especially when it’s an east-meets-west thing – third-culture cuisine is the assumption of a complete immersion in different cultures, which gives you access to certain types of nuances that each culture can appreciate.”

As for Kung’s next trick, he’s still exploring. “I have some dream formats that I would like to experiment with. Maybe a graphic novel cookbook, maybe one that focuses on diet and nutrition from the side of cooking and enjoying Chinese food,” he shares. “And making more videos of course”.

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