Chef Ron Hsu unites Southern and Asian cuisines in debut cookbook
The chef's Chinese background and upbringing in the South inspired "Down South + East: A Chinese American Cookbook"
Ron Hsu is a Chinese American chef born and raised in the South.
Photo by Colette Collins
Words by Anjana Pawa
Ron Hsu was just a kid when he understood that his family was a little bit different. When other kids went home after school, he went to work at his family’s restaurant. His mother Betty made an arrangement with the superintendent of his school district in suburban Atlanta. She would provide Chinese lunches for her son's entire class in exchange for one small favor: that the last stop on the school’s bus route be her restaurant.
Born and raised in the South, Hsu is the son of immigrants who built a chain of Chinese American restaurants. His parents built a business and they started it the way immigrants often do—by making it a total project, something that consumed their lives and the family entirely. The restaurant absorbed Hsu’s childhood. After homework came kitchen work. He was cutting onions and carrots at first, and then he would work the fry station. "The restaurant encapsulated my life,” Hsu tells JoySauce. His mother’s philosophy was that the restaurant and home were the same thing. "They were inseparable in a way."
The first essay he wrote for his new cookbook was about his mother. "I just thought about the big inspirations in my life and how they informed my career and cooking style," Hsu shares. "The essays in the book are reflections of that. I took some of the most influential aspects of my life and the ones that informed my style of hospitality and cooking the most."
Watching his mother cook and run the restaurant was the blueprint for his own craft, and his restaurant, Lazy Betty, which was named after her. "(She) really taught me a different perspective and definition of the word hospitality," Hsu shares. Yes, he was embedded in restaurant culture at the actual physical location, but in their family, it went far beyond that. His mother ran somewhat of an unofficial boarding house for the workers at her restaurant, who she sponsored as well as employed.
"My mother would sponsor and immigrate people over to come work in our restaurant," Hsu says. "Part of their acclimation to the United States was that they would live in our house long term." He remembers a core part of his childhood being enmeshed with these people who became like family. Some days, he’d come home from school and be assigned new living quarters within their home. "My mom would say, 'Hey Ron, next week you're going to have to give up your bedroom for a month, two months, six months, whatever it was, for this new chef or server we have.'"
This enigmatic childhood is the starting point for his debut cookbook, Down South + East: A Chinese American Cookbook, a collection of recipes and personal essays that traces how his upbringing in the South, his family's immigrant background, and his later formal culinary training landed him a flourishing life in the kitchen. The essays in the book cover parts of his life from personal to professional: his relationship with his parents, his mother’s restaurant, his time training at Le Bernardin in New York, and Buford Highway, the Atlanta corridor that runs through a lush collection of restaurants that immigrants built from their home kitchens to city centers, or what Hsu calls a “hodgepodge” in the book.
Atlanta has seen a pretty big change over the last few decades, becoming one of the most demographically diverse cities in the South. "Nowadays, Atlanta is a very transient city with people moving from everywhere," Hsu explains. For a chef whose identity sits precisely at the intersection of Southern and Asian food culture, it is a natural home. The chef who grew to feel at home in Atlanta is the one who penned the book that’s on shelves now. The recipes do not treat Southern food and Asian food as separate entitles, or even as separate novelties, they treat them as two traditions that share a genuine common ground.
"I think the biggest thread is comfort," Hsu shares about the intersection between Asian and Southern cooking. "Chinese food is very family oriented. You have shared plates at the table. Southern food is the same.” And it isn’t just the traditions shared in the seats around the table, but also what’s on the plates. The char siu ribs recipe in his book makes the case plainly. Char siu is a Chinese meat preparation found across much of Asia, and, as Hsu points out, it is also just barbecue. "Char siu is Chinese barbecue, and I'm from the South where barbecue is a major cuisine," he says. "So for me it felt like a recipe that expressed who I am."
The collard green fried rice works similarly. In Southern cooking, collard greens are braised for a long time, generally quite slowly, a staple side dish on the plate. In Hsu's fried rice recipe, they go in at the last minute, barely cooked and still brightly colored, the way you usually see greens in Chinese cooking. When he made the dish for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the journalist was skeptical of its slight rawness until she tasted it. "She was surprised that the greens were barely cooked," Hsu said. "But when she tasted it, she said it worked." He had somehow reflected the intersection at which he was raised in a bowl of rice.
For readers coming to the cookbook with no cooking experience, Hsu suggests simply to start with what’s on the page and then make the recipes your own. "I hope people take my recipes and evolve them," he says. "If someone takes a recipe and makes their own version, that's a huge compliment. It means I've become part of their life and their table." He recommends beginning with the char siu ribs or the steamed bao buns with buttermilk sauce, a dish that, in his words, sits at "a good intersection of my Southern identity and my culinary pedigree." For the more adventurous, there is the blueberry and lemongrass pie, which he calls one of the harder recipes in the book, but feels is well worth the effort. And there is the meatloaf, a classic Southern dish with an Asian twist—a dish his mother used to make, now appearing for the first time in print.
Published on March 26, 2026
Words by Anjana Pawa
Anjana Pawa is a Brooklyn-based culture reporter who regularly covers music, entertainment and beauty. You can find her on Twitter at @apawawrites.