Edward Lee

Some chefs cook a place. Some chefs cook a story. Edward Lee has spent more than two decades doing both at once, and the result is one of the most quietly thrilling kitchens in America. Walk into 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky, and you might be handed country ham from the Ohio Valley lit up with the fermented heat of gochujang, or a plate of greens that tastes faintly and wonderfully of Seoul. None of it reads as a gimmick. It reads as a cook working through his own biography, one dish at a time.

Born in Brooklyn to Korean parents and raised on his grandmother’s cooking, Lee arrived in Kentucky almost by accident and stayed for good. Along the way he has won a James Beard Award for his writing, charmed audiences on Iron Chef America, Top Chef and the Netflix hit Culinary Class Wars, cooked at a White House state dinner, and built a nonprofit that has fed and trained thousands of restaurant workers. If you want to understand what New Southern cooking has become in the twenty-first century, his kitchen is a very good place to start.

TL;DR

• American chef, author and restaurateur, born in Brooklyn on 2 July 1972 to Korean parents.
• Chef and owner of 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky, his flagship since the early 2000s.
• Cooks New Southern food that folds Korean flavours into bourbon country ingredients.
• Won the 2019 James Beard Award for Best Book of the Year in Writing for Buttermilk Graffiti.
• Founded the LEE Initiative, named James Beard Humanitarian of the Year in 2024.
• Finished as runner-up on Culinary Class Wars in 2024 and now hosts Edward Lee’s Country Cook on tvN.

Edward Lee key facts

Edward Lee: career timeline

From a Brooklyn childhood to a literature degree

Edward Lee was born on 2 July 1972 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Korean immigrants. Home cooking was the first language he learned properly. He has said he began cooking at eleven, and he credits his grandmother with lighting the fuse: her kitchen was where fermentation, patience and the deep savoury logic of Korean food first made sense to him. Those early lessons never left him. Decades later they resurfaced in a Kentucky dining room, dressed in sorghum and smoke.

He did not go straight into a professional kitchen. Lee studied at New York University and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in literature, and for a while he assumed writing rather than cooking would be his career. That detour turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to his food. The narrative instinct he built as a reader runs through his cookbooks, his television work and even his menus, which tend to read like short essays about migration, memory and place.

Learning the trade the long way round

Lee began cooking professionally at twenty-two at Chez Es Saada, a French Moroccan restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. There was no culinary school diploma and no tidy apprenticeship ladder. Instead he cooked, travelled and cooked some more: a summer in France moving through several restaurants, then roughly five years devoted to Korean cooking and the wider kitchens of East and Southeast Asia. In 1996 he opened his first place, a small Korean restaurant called Clay in Nolita, where kalbi was the draw. Clay closed after the September 11 attacks, and Lee found himself, at the start of a new decade, wide open to whatever came next.

How Kentucky claimed him

What came next was a horse race. In 2001 Lee travelled to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby, and the city got under his skin almost immediately: the bourbon, the hospitality, the pantry of country ham, sorghum, buttermilk and pickled everything. He moved there in 2002 and began working at 610 Magnolia alongside its then chef and owner Eddie Garber. Barely a year later, the restaurant was his.

610 Magnolia became his laboratory. Under Lee it grew into one of the South’s most talked about fine dining rooms, built on seasonal, ingredient-driven menus that change constantly and reward diners who put themselves in the kitchen’s hands. In 2007 he added the Wine Studio, an events space attached to the restaurant. The address on Magnolia Avenue has since become shorthand for a particular kind of ambition: proudly regional, relaxed about pedigree, deadly serious about flavour.

The Korean and Southern kitchen

Ask what Lee actually cooks and the honest answer is that he cooks the overlap. Korean heritage on one side, the American South on the other, and an enormous amount of joy in the space between. Bourbon, country ham, sorghum and cornmeal meet gochujang, doenjang, sesame and the sharp lift of kimchi. Critics file it under New Southern cooking, a movement that treats immigrant influence not as decoration but as the engine of the region’s food.

Cooking along the same latitude

Lee has offered a lovely theory for why the pairing works so well. On The Mind of a Chef he explained that ingredients grown along the same latitude tend to get along at the table, even when the fields are thousands of miles apart. Kentucky and Korea sit on roughly the same band of the globe, and both traditions lean hard on fermentation, pork, chilli heat and slow smoke. Once you have heard the idea, pickled vegetables beside a plate of pork belly stop looking clever and start looking inevitable.

A television career built on curiosity

Lee’s first big television moment came in 2010 on season eight of Iron Chef America. The following year he competed on Top Chef: Texas, winning two elimination challenges and finishing fifth overall. Then came the format that suited him best. In 2014 he fronted the third season of the PBS series The Mind of a Chef, which let him wander, think out loud and connect ingredients to history, and it earned him a Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Culinary Host in 2015. In 2017 he served as chef judge on the American version of Culinary Genius.

A second act in Korea

In 2024 Lee joined the Netflix competition Culinary Class Wars, filmed in South Korea, and finished as runner-up in front of an enormous international audience. In the final round he cooked a dessert inspired by tteokbokki and shared the Korean given name he had carried quietly all his life, Kyun. The moment landed hard with Korean viewers, and it opened a whole new chapter.

Recognition followed quickly. In January 2025 the Corea Image Communication Institute gave him its Stepping Stone Award for introducing Korean culture to wider audiences. A month later, on 14 February 2025, his own travel and food series Edward Lee’s Country Cook premiered on tvN, following him through rural South Korea in search of traditional techniques and regional ingredients. He also appeared on the revived Please Take Care of My Refrigerator in December 2024.

The LEE Initiative and a kitchen with a conscience

In 2014 Lee partnered with YouthBuild and IDEAS 40203 to launch a culinary training programme in Louisville’s Smoketown neighbourhood, aimed at young people who could never afford culinary school. Their pop-up diner, Smoke and Soul, opened in 2015. In 2017 he founded the LEE Initiative, the letters standing for Let’s Empower Employment. Its programmes tackle diversity, opportunity and retention across the restaurant industry, including Women Chefs in Kentucky.

When dining rooms closed in 2020, the organisation moved fast. The Restaurant Workers Relief Program turned shuttered restaurants into relief centres for staff who had been laid off, and Lee converted his Louisville restaurant Milkwood into the McAtee Community Kitchen, named for David McAtee, feeding the West End, Shelby Park and Russell neighbourhoods. The work was recognised with the Muhammad Ali Kentucky Humanitarian Award in 2021 and, in 2024, with the James Beard Humanitarian of the Year award.

Washington, sustainability and a state dinner

Lee’s map has widened well beyond Kentucky. Succotash, his Southern and Asian restaurant, opened at National Harbor in Maryland in 2015 and added a Washington location in 2017, and he serves as culinary director for both. In April 2023 he was invited to be guest chef for the White House state dinner honouring the visit of South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, a menu that braided Korean and American elements into a single evening of culinary diplomacy.

In November 2024 he opened Shia in Washington, a fine dining Korean American restaurant designed around sustainability as much as flavour. The kitchen runs plastic-free, dehydrates its waste and prints menus and coasters from leftover paper. In Louisville he also opened Nami Modern Korean Steakhouse in 2023, which USA Today named to its best restaurants list in 2024, and which served the city for two years before closing in November 2025.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Edward Lee

See Edward in action in this video.

Signature dishes

Lee’s cooking is not really built around a single museum-piece dish, but a handful of ideas recur and diners chase them. Country ham glazed with the fermented depth of gochujang is pure Lee, a handshake between two curing traditions. So is bourbon, which he treats as an ingredient rather than a drink, reducing it into sauces, glazes and desserts throughout Bourbon Land. Collards, cornbread, buttermilk and pickled vegetables appear constantly, always with a Korean turn of the wrist. And then there is the tteokbokki-inspired dessert he cooked in the Culinary Class Wars final, a chewy rice cake reimagined as something sweet and deeply personal, which has become the plate most viewers now associate with him.

Cookbooks

Edward is the author of books including Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen (2013), Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine (2018), Bourbon Land: A Spirited Love Letter to My Old Kentucky Whiskey (2024).

Personal life

Lee is married to Dianne Lee, a Kentucky native, and the couple wed in 2010. They have one daughter, who appeared alongside her parents when Edward Lee’s Country Cook launched in 2025. He splits his working life between Louisville and Washington, and he remains as committed to reading and writing as to cooking, which is probably why his books read like travelogues rather than recipe manuals.

Edward in context

Edward Lee is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Anne Burrell and Alison Roman.

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Edward Lee official site · Instagram

Edward Lee FAQ

Who is Edward Lee?
Edward Lee is an American chef, author and restaurateur born in Brooklyn in 1972 to Korean parents. He is best known for the Korean-influenced New Southern cooking he serves at 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky.

Where can you eat Edward Lee’s food?
His flagship is 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky. He also owns Shia in Washington, D.C., and is culinary director for Succotash Prime in Washington and at National Harbor, Maryland.

Has Edward Lee won a James Beard Award?
Yes. He won the 2019 James Beard Award for Best Book of the Year in Writing for Buttermilk Graffiti, and the LEE Initiative he founded was named James Beard Humanitarian of the Year in 2024.

How did Edward Lee do on Culinary Class Wars?
He finished as runner-up in the 2024 Netflix series filmed in South Korea, and revealed his Korean given name, Kyun, during the final round after cooking a dessert inspired by tteokbokki.

What cookbooks has Edward Lee written?
Three so far: Smoke and Pickles (2013), Buttermilk Graffiti (2018) and Bourbon Land (2024).

What is the LEE Initiative?
It is the nonprofit Lee founded in Louisville in 2017. The name stands for Let’s Empower Employment, and it runs training, relief and diversity programmes for restaurant workers across the United States.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, NPR, The Washington Post, The Courier-Journal, Eater DC, PBS NewsHour, chefedwardlee.com.