Jet Tila

Some chefs discover Asian cooking. Jet Tila was raised inside it. He grew up in the aisles of Bangkok Market, the Los Angeles grocery his family opened in 1972 and the first Thai market in the United States, doing homework in a back corner while customers hunted for galangal, palm sugar and fresh rice noodles. Decades later he is one of the most recognisable faces on Food Network, the host of Ready Jet Cook, a bestselling cookbook author, and the chef who convinced a generation of American home cooks that pad thai and drunken noodles are weeknight food rather than restaurant magic.

Born Jet Tilakamonkul in Los Angeles on 6 February 1975, he trained classically at Le Cordon Bleu, ran kitchens from Hollywood to Dallas, developed menus for national restaurant groups, and became the first chef ever appointed Culinary Ambassador of Thai Cuisine by the Royal Thai Consulate-General in Los Angeles. This profile follows the family story, the restaurants, the television career, the cookbooks, and what he has on the stove right now.

TL;DR

• American chef, restaurateur, author and television host, born 6 February 1975 in Los Angeles.
• Raised in the family behind Bangkok Market, opened in 1972 and widely described as the first Thai market in the United States.
• Classically trained at Le Cordon Bleu, then built a career translating Thai and Chinese cooking for American kitchens.
• Chef and partner at Pakpao Thai in Dallas, founder of The Charleston and Stir Market in Los Angeles, and developer of Dragon Tiger Noodle Co. in Nevada.
• Host of Ready Jet Cook and a fixture on Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, Beat Bobby Flay, Guy’s Grocery Games and Tournament of Champions.
• Author of the 101 Dishes cookbook series, including 101 Thai Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die.

Jet Tila key facts

Jet Tila: career timeline

The first family of Thai food

To understand Jet Tila you have to understand a grocery store. His parents arrived in the United States separately in 1966, part of the small wave of Thai immigrants who would go on to build one of the most influential food communities in Los Angeles. The family traces its ancestry back to Hainan, the southern Chinese island province whose cooks have quietly shaped kitchens across Southeast Asia for centuries. That double inheritance, Thai and Hainanese Chinese, runs through everything he cooks.

In 1972 the family opened Bangkok Market, generally credited as the first Thai grocery in the United States. It was not a boutique. It was a working supply line: fish sauce by the case, fresh galangal and kaffir lime, holy basil, rice noodles, curry pastes, all of it landing in a city that had almost no idea what to do with them yet. Restaurants bought there. Home cooks bought there. New arrivals from Bangkok found a piece of home there.

Bangkok Market and the making of Thai Town

The Tila family did not simply sell ingredients, they helped create the demand for them. Alongside the market the family opened some of the earliest Thai restaurants in the country, and the neighbourhood that grew up around those businesses became Thai Town, the stretch of East Hollywood that is now the only officially designated Thai Town in America. Jet grew up moving between Thai Town, Koreatown, Chinatown and the wider mix of communities that gives Los Angeles its particular flavour.

That upbringing explains why his cooking never feels like a single cuisine. He learned Thai balance at home, Chinese wok technique in family kitchens, Korean barbecue and Japanese knife work from the neighbourhoods next door, and he treats all of it as the same living tradition rather than a set of separate boxes.

Classical training, Asian instincts

Rather than lean only on family knowledge, Tila went and got the other half of the education. He completed formal culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu, absorbing the French fundamentals: stocks, sauces, brigade discipline, the vocabulary that professional kitchens run on. He also studied Chinese and Japanese cooking directly, which is why his sushi and his sauces both hold up under scrutiny.

The combination turned out to be his professional edge. He can explain a Thai curry paste in the language of a classically trained saucier, and he can explain a French mother sauce to someone who grew up with fish sauce and lime. That translation skill is the thread running through his restaurants, his books and his television work: he is less interested in guarding technique than in handing it over.

The restaurants: Los Angeles, Dallas and Las Vegas

Tila stepped out on his own in Los Angeles with The Charleston, which he ran from 2014 until 2021, and in the same year he opened Stir Market, an ambitious food hall and restaurant on Fairfax that gave the city a place to eat, shop and linger under one roof. Also in 2014 he took on the role of chef and partner at Pakpao Thai in Dallas, bringing a level of Thai cooking to Texas that the city had rarely seen from a national name.

Alongside his own places he built a second career as a restaurant developer, the person brands call when a menu needs to be rebuilt from the flavour up rather than tweaked at the edges. He has served as restaurant developer and minor partner for Pei Wei Asian Kitchen, where he took the driver’s seat on menu evolution, proving that fast casual Asian food does not have to taste like a compromise.

Dragon Tiger Noodle Co. and cooking at scale

His clearest statement in the fast casual space is Dragon Tiger Noodle Co., which he developed and grew to three locations across Las Vegas and Henderson, Nevada. The concept is exactly what the name suggests: noodles and wok cooking done properly and quickly, the sort of food he grew up eating, priced for people who eat out several times a week rather than once a year.

It is a deliberate choice. Tila has spent his career arguing that the fastest way to change how a country eats is not through tasting menus but through the places people actually go, which is why so much of his energy goes into menus that reach thousands of guests a day.

Television: from competitor to host

American audiences met Tila on the competition circuit. He appeared on Iron Chef America as a challenger, then returned in 2018 in a very different role as the show’s floor reporter. Along the way he became a regular presence across Food Network, judging and competing on Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, Beat Bobby Flay, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Guy’s Grocery Games and Tournament of Champions, and co-hosting the Halloween Cookie Challenge.

He is a natural on camera for a reason that has nothing to do with theatrics. He explains. Ask him why a wok needs to be screaming hot, why palm sugar behaves differently from white sugar, or why you should soak rice noodles rather than boil them, and you get a clear answer in about fifteen seconds. In 2021 he took home 20,000 dollars as the winner of the Guy’s Grocery Games episode Delivery: All-Star Noodles, an appropriate battlefield.

Ready Jet Cook

His own series, Ready Jet Cook, premiered on Food Network on 19 August 2023 and has run for multiple seasons since. The format is quietly personal: he walks through his family’s grocery store to shop for ingredients, then heads home and cooks the dishes he actually makes for his family. Pad thai, drunken noodles, Thai basil chicken, beef and broccoli, sesame chicken, khao soi.

The show works because it removes the two things that usually stop people cooking Asian food at home: not knowing what to buy, and not knowing what the ingredient is for. Watching him pick up a bottle in the same aisle his parents stocked half a century ago gives the series a warmth that no studio kitchen could manufacture.

Culinary ambassador, record breaker, teacher

In 2013 the Royal Thai Consulate-General in Los Angeles appointed Tila as Culinary Ambassador of Thai Cuisine, the first chef given the honour of formally representing Thai food and culture in that way. It is a title he has taken seriously, using it to push for Thai cooking to be understood on its own terms rather than flattened into a single sweet peanut sauce.

He also has an entertaining sideline in enormous food. He has taken part in several record setting cooks, including the world’s largest stir fry, the world’s largest seafood stew, the world’s largest California roll, and a fruit salad that tipped the scales at 15,291 pounds in 2013. Beyond the spectacle, the teaching instinct is constant: he has been recognised by the James Beard Foundation, nominated for Emmy awards for his television work, and spends a remarkable amount of time simply showing people how to hold a wok.

Jet Tila in 2026

He has had a busy year. In April 2026 the Cordish Companies announced an exclusive partnership bringing his signature dishes to Luk Fu, the pan-Asian restaurant brand inside Live! Casinos and Hotels. The Luk Fu by Jet Tila menu launched on 12 May 2026 at Live! Casino and Hotel Philadelphia with around a dozen dishes, including a tempura crunch roll with yuzu miso, hamachi with chili ponzu, sweet heat chicken wings, Thai pineapple fried rice, a salmon dynamite bowl and his own version of pad thai. The menu is set to roll out to Bossier City in Louisiana and Hanover in Maryland later in the year.

Then in July 2026 he became the debut resident of Habit and Co., a new chef in residency platform from Habit Burger and Grill. His Korean Street Menu, built around sweet heat, crunch and chargrilled beef, ran nationwide from 22 July, featuring Korean fried chicken bites, a crispy rice Korean salad and a sweet and spicy Korean char burger. He has also confirmed further seasons of Ready Jet Cook and a return to Tournament of Champions, so the Los Angeles kid from the back of the grocery store shows no sign of slowing down.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Jet Tila

See Jet in action in this video.

Signature dishes

If one plate belongs to him it is drunken noodles, pad kee mao, the late night Thai and Chinese hybrid of wide rice noodles, holy basil, chilies and garlic that he calls a marriage of his two heritages. His pad thai recipe, taught with an insistence on soaking rather than boiling the noodles and on getting the tamarind and palm sugar balance right, has become one of the most followed versions online. Beyond the noodles he is closely associated with Thai basil chicken, khao soi, salt and pepper shrimp, general Tso’s chicken, beef and broccoli, and the kind of Hainanese chicken rice that reaches straight back to his family’s origins.

Cookbooks

Jet is the author of books including 101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die (2017), 101 Epic Dishes, written with Ali Tila (2019), 101 Thai Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die, written with Tad Weyland Fukumoto (2022).

Personal life

Tila lives in Los Angeles with his wife Ali, who co-wrote 101 Epic Dishes with him, and their two children, daughter Amaya and son Ren. Family cooking is not a marketing angle in the Tila house, it is the actual centre of gravity: the children cook alongside their parents, and the family grocery store still functions as the pantry behind the television show. He describes himself, only half jokingly, as the mayor of Thai Town.

Jet in context

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

Follow Jet Tila

Jet Tila · official site · Instagram

Jet Tila FAQ

Who is Jet Tila?
Jet Tila, born Jet Tilakamonkul, is an American chef, restaurateur, cookbook author and television host from Los Angeles. He is known for modern Thai and Chinese cooking, for his Food Network series Ready Jet Cook, and for coming from the family behind Bangkok Market, the first Thai grocery store in the United States.

How old is Jet Tila and where was he born?
He was born on 6 February 1975 in Los Angeles, California, to Thai Chinese parents who emigrated to the United States in 1966.

What restaurants does Jet Tila have?
He has been chef and partner at Pakpao Thai in Dallas, ran The Charleston and the Stir Market food hall in Los Angeles, developed Dragon Tiger Noodle Co. in Las Vegas and Henderson, worked as restaurant developer for Pei Wei Asian Kitchen, and in 2026 launched a signature menu at the Luk Fu restaurants inside Live! Casinos and Hotels.

What cookbooks has Jet Tila written?
He wrote 101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die in 2017, 101 Epic Dishes with his wife Ali Tila in 2019, and 101 Thai Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die with Tad Weyland Fukumoto in 2022.

What is Jet Tila’s signature dish?
Drunken noodles, or pad kee mao, is the dish most closely tied to him, followed by his widely taught pad thai. Both sit at the meeting point of his Thai and Chinese heritage.

What television shows is Jet Tila on?
He hosts Ready Jet Cook on Food Network and has appeared on Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, Beat Bobby Flay, Guy’s Grocery Games, Tournament of Champions, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Iron Chef America and the Halloween Cookie Challenge.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, Food Network, chefjet.com, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Live! Casino and Hotel Philadelphia.