Cook Like a King: Recipes from My California Chinese Kitchen

by Melissa King, JJ Goode (Editor)

Overview

In her debut cookbook, Top Chef All-Stars champion and award-winning chef Melissa King shares 120 of her favorite dishes, blending her California sensibility with the Chinese cuisine of her childhood.

From the moment she could see over the kitchen counter, King would spend hours in the kitchen with her mom. For King, the kitchen was a place to play with fire and knives. Now, it's a space where King can express herself, melding the Cantonese flavors with which she grew up and the French, Italian, and Californian ones of the Michelin-starred restaurants in which she trained.

Cook Like a King features 120 unforgettable dishes that showcase King's effortless blending of these cuisines, like in her Lemongrass Cioppino and Miso Caesar with Gai Lan and Chrysanthemum Greens. She includes nostalgic, homestyle dishes like her grandmother’s Shanghainese Lion's Head Meatballs and her mother’s Black Vinegar Ribs, and, of course, her famous Hong Kong Milk Tea Tiramisu, which made renowned Italian butcher and Top Chef guest judge Dario Cecchini shed tears of joy.

King keeps the needs of the home cook in mind, making recipes accessible while inspiring readers to experiment with food, culture, and flavor. Her recipes, crafted from a lifetime spent cooking for her Chinese family, in restaurants, and on television, show how simple techniques, attention, and graceful application of the Asian pantry can elevate familiar dishes and create new, thrilling classics. With stunning photography, personal stories, and expert guidance, Cook Like a King is a thoughtful, playful examination of the flavors that shape our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984861924
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	8.27(w) x 10.27(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

Chef Melissa King is best known as the winner of Bravo’s Top Chef All-Stars: Los Angeles Season 17 and the winner of All-Star’s Fan Favorite. King holds more challenge wins than any other competitor in the show's history. She is the host of Tasting Wild, the National Geographic docuseries and serves as a guest judge on Top Chef, Food Network’s The Julia Child Challenge, Pamela Anderson’s Cooking with Love, and America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation. Along with being a chef-entrepreneur, event curator, television personality, philanthropist, and model, she is an activist who speaks publicly on issues of women’s empowerment, LGBTQ+ rights, sustainability, food education, and diversity in entrepreneurship. Out Magazine named her one of the 100 LGBTQ+ individuals making a groundbreaking impact on the world.

JJ Goode helps people write books, and mostly cookbooks, which are the best books. He has coauthored several New York Times bestsellers and has been nominated for several James Beard awards.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

I had been trying to wow famed Italian butcher Dario Cecchini. I didn’t mean to make him cry.

I was in Tuscany for the finale of Top Chef: All-Stars, contemplating the sweet ending to the four-course meal I would prepare for the judges. I didn’t know it at the time but this meal would ultimately change my life. To honor where we were, I decided to make tiramisu, the iconic Italian dessert of espresso-soaked ladyfingers layered with mascarpone custard. I didn’t want to fundamentally change the dish, but I did want to add a bit of me.

I thought of my childhood home. There was my mom and dad, both first-gen immigrants from Hong Kong and hard-working engineers, and my sister and me, who raced around the house wearing the Styrofoam sweaters that cradle Asian pears on our wrists as Wonder Woman cuffs. When we woke up, it wasn’t to the smell of coffee but to that of lai cha (or Hong Kong milk tea), the strongly brewed black tea with sweetened condensed milk that my parents drank every morning.

If I traded the classic coffee element in tiramisu for lai cha, and if I tweaked the other elements just slightly, so the subtle, tannic qualities of the tea could shine through the richness, I might just bridge two culinary cultures I deeply admired. That’s what, Dario explained, had moved him to tears. The idea that respect for tradition and openness to new ideas can coexist, and deliciously at that.

My ability to honor who I was, a seemingly simple ask, had actually been a lifetime in the making. And the winding path toward finding myself ran through the kitchen. So many of my childhood memories are of food. The beef shank simmered with rock sugar and soy sauce (page 71) that I’d snack on like deli meat from our fridge. The Thanksgiving feasts with sticky rice–stuffed roasted duck instead of turkey. The crispy pork belly, poached chickens, and red slabs of glistening char siu swinging in the window of our local Cantonese barbecue house in the San Gabriel Valley, and the taco trucks next door in East LA serving al pastor, another sort of red pork, this one carved from a vertical spit.

When we did have a homecooked meal, my mom was the cook (though not for long). My dad rarely entered the kitchen, but when he did, he’d make the only dish he knew: “lion’s head” meatballs (page 214), a cozy Shanghainese dish of silky pork meatballs simmered in broth with cabbage and glass noodles that reminds him of his mom. I loved it for dinner, but not so much when it made its way into my school lunchbox, where it turned heads and scrunched up noses. My mom cooked simple homestyle Cantonese dishes: pork ribs braised in black vinegar, chicken wings glazed with soy sauce and sugar, steamed egg custard with clams, and whole fish with ginger and scallions. By the time I could see over the counter, I would help.

While my mom cooked, I watched from a wooden stool and we’d talk in our own seamless blend of Cantonese and English. I cherished this time with her, so I set out to make it more likely, rushing home from school to finish my homework and then chopping bok choy and washing rice in preparation for her arrival.

Soon, I graduated from being mom’s tiny sous-chef to making meals myself. Because I wasn’t yet old enough to use the stove, I’d assemble the whole fish and microwave it, just like mom occasionally did. If my parents were sick, I’d make them jook (rice porridge) in the rice cooker, propping open the lid with chopsticks, just like my mom taught me, to keep it from overflowing. When I was stove ready, I’d climb my stool after school and start a pot of bone broth with black Silkie chicken, ginger, and ginseng. I’d stir-fry bok choy and steam pork patties with salted duck egg. In an early experiment with fusion, I cooked jook with a stock made from smoked turkey legs I’d taken home from Disneyland.

Sometimes I’d forget the salt. Sometimes I’d add a handful instead of a pinch. But my family always ate what I’d made, usually without complaint. Feeding my parents was my way of taking care of them, or at least of thanking them for taking care of me. But I won’t lie. I also loved the thrill of playing with fire and knives.

When I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to be a chef. My parents, however, weren’t having it. Like many immigrants, they had sacrificed so much to give their children the life they wished they’d had. They wanted better for me than toiling in a kitchen. Yet the heart wants what it wants. While in college, I juggled entry-level kitchen work between semesters, dabbling in the world of pastries and banquet cooking. After college, I enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, with my mom and dad’s reluctant blessing, trading my Chinese meat cleaver (a gift from my mom for my eighth birthday) for a French chef’s knife.

At first, I was slightly disoriented. When my instructors demonstrated how to cook duck breasts, slowly rendering the skin to crisp it and then cutting it into rosy red slices, I wondered: Why were we shooting for mid-rare when the roast duck I grew up eating was delicious cooked extremely well done? Yet I welcomed the new perspectives and flavors. I had my first taste of beets and parsnips, and my first experience with cheese that wasn’t sold as slices individually wrapped in plastic. I learned to brown butter and deglaze with wine. I saw that carrots, celery, and onion were to French cooking what scallion, ginger, and garlic were to Cantonese. Most of all, culinary school revealed a path to being a great cook: discipline and repetition to tone the muscle of cooking.

After culinary school, my job search took me to the culinary boomtown that was San Francisco in the early 2000s. My focus was fine dining, and I landed in several Michelin-starred kitchens. I fell for the hustle and the pressure of perfectionism. Working as a saucier under chef Dominique Crenn, I practiced patience to unlock flavors in sauces and soups. I saw how attention to detail—the quality of ingredients, generosity with salt, the importance of developing a deeply browned crust on a rib eye—could transform a good dish to a great one.

After several years of making gelées and foams, I left to cook rustic Italian, applying the same level of care I’d devoted to molecular French cooking to simpler food. With some love, flour and water could become beautiful ribbons of tagliatelle or crusty, bubbly focaccia. The same layering of flavor that produced great bordelaise could also make fantastic marinara. I loved the purity of Italian cooking. Instead of twenty ingredients on each plate, there might be three, each thoughtfully selected and embellished with little more than good olive oil, citrus, and flaky salt. In many ways, the soulful flavors reminded me of the Cantonese food I made at home between shifts. I started to notice moments of overlap between the very different cuisines. As I formed ravioli at work, I thought of the dumplings I’d make with my Cantonese grandma, Sabrina PoPo. As I cooked risotto, I thought of the jook I cooked for my parents. Still, I kept this part of me separate from my work as a professional cook. Back then, Michelin stars were still the most important measures of success, and at the time you didn’t win them by making wontons.

I’d raid the walk-in for vegetable trim and cuts of meat and fish not quite perfect enough to fetch tastingmenu prices. I’d turn lobster knuckles and fish tails into a sort of Thai-ish cioppino, San Francisco’s iconic fish stew infused with lemongrass and lime leaves. I’d batter and fry odd pieces of halibut for tacos and make guacamole, which I’d learned from my Mexican colleagues over the years, who called me chinita and then, after I chopped off my hair, chinito. The part of my brain that linked risotto and jook went into overdrive. Suddenly, Italian porchetta reminded me of Filipino lechon liempo, just with different aromatics. Chinese orange chicken struck me as similar to French duck à l’orange. My culinary voice was starting to take shape.

By the time I competed on season 12 of Top Chef, I was dabbling in the food that would become my style today. But looking back on that season, I was mostly mimicking what I’d learned from my mentors. I was stuck in my head, overthinking, overanalyzing, doubting myself. Yet something changed when my mom showed up for one of the challenges. In a full-circle moment, she became my sous-chef for the day, helping me cook luxurious lobster-topped Japanese egg custard, a dish that reminded me of but was also so different from the egg custard with clams she cooked for our family. It was as if a switch had flipped. I stepped out of my head. I stopped worrying about what I should cook and embraced what I wanted to cook. It remains one of the most memorable moments of my life. Cooking side by side with my mom, I felt the comfort and freedom I did as a kid, but now I also had the skill and experience I’d worked so hard to build.

Editorial Reviews

Ever since I first tasted Melissa’s cooking on Top Chef, I’ve been waiting for this book. Her food is beautiful and comforting, elegant, and very doable. Part of her genius is blending flavors and cultures with intention, so each dish seems both familiar and like nothing you’ve ever tasted. Buy this book. Use it often. I know I will.”—Padma Lakshmi, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning executive producer and TV host

“To honor who we are as chefs is hard enough. To do so unapologetically, deliciously, and with style is even more difficult. To do all that and inspire others to cook, to create food so irresistible that I am insistent that you buy this book that my friend made for you, well, that is pure magic. And magic is indeed what’s inside these covers. Melissa King is a phenomenal talent, a superb cook in every sense of the word, and her recipes—several of which I have had the pleasure of eating—are incomparably craveable. You will be cooking out of this book for years and years. And wowing whoever is at your table.”—Andrew Zimmern

“Chef Melissa is one of the most talented chefs in the country. I have had the privilege to have her food many times, and now we all can cook her food at home. I can’t wait to eat through this book with my family.”—Marcus Samuelsson, award-winning chef, author, and restaurateur

From the Publisher