Adrian Miller & Deborah Chang Author Event • Asian Heritage Chefs in White House History: Cooking to the President’s Taste

Adrian Miller is a food writer and attorney. A two-time James Beard Award winner, his books include Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas and Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. He received his A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995. In 2022, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Denver Institute for Urban Studies and Adult College. From 1999 to 2001, Adrian served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America and went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. Since 2013, Adrian has been the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches. Adrian is also the co-project director and lead curator for the “Proclaiming Colorado’s “Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History” exhibit at the Museum of Boulder. A certified barbecue judge, Adrian lives in Denver, Colorado.

Deborah Chang - After graduating from the Napa Valley Culinary School, Deborah Chang cooked at numerous Bay Area restaurants, created award winning recipes for Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt and the National Peanut Board and tested and wrote recipes for a cookbook with Insalata’s, a Mediterranean restaurant in Marin County. She was born and raised in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where she remembers routinely heading over to Windsor, Canada, to enjoy jing du pork chops, lugging Chinese groceries back across the border, and wondering why almond chicken was the most popular dish at her parent’s restaurant, Dragon Inn. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Michigan Law School. Her expansive career has included being an attorney, a tech executive, and most recently a career counselor. Her writing has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hill, and Bridge Eight Literary Press. She now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.

Asian Heritage Chefs in White House History- The first ever history of the many Asian Heritage chefs who have prepared meals for the presidents at the White House, at State Dinners, on Presidential Yachts, and at Camp David. From navy stewards to Executive White House Chefs, the presidential service of these chefs extends back more than a century and continues to the present day, yet many of their names are largely unknown. 

Two-time James Beard award winner Adrian Miller was inspired to uncover and share their stories after discovering the extraordinary but long out-of-print biography of Lee Ping Quan, a Chinese born U.S. Navy steward who served President Warren G. Harding and then President Calvin Coolidge aboard the presidential yacht USS Mayflower. Miller decided not only to make Quan’s history again, but to expand the story to include experiences of many Asian Heritage chefs who have served the presidency.

He explains that he was able to identify presidential chefs with roots in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. His research is enriched by the biographies, memoirs, cookbooks, and news coverage of the early chefs, and by his own interviews with former and current White House chefs. We learn that each chef has taken a unique path to the American dream, but they share remarkable talents, a devotion to excellence, and a pride in their service.

Through Deborah Chang, who selected and shaped sixty recipes that can be made in a twenty-first-century home kitchen, we see that featured chefs specialize not only in Asian dishes but also in creative approaches to fusion cuisine, healthy choices, and American classics such as fried chicken and chocolate cream pie.