The Most Influential Chefs Throughout American History

The culinary history of the United States has been crafted through tradition, exchange, and immigration. It all began with indigenous cuisine, the food grown and cooked by America's many indigenous nations. These cultures domesticated some of today's most popular crops, including squash and corn.

Generations of indigenous cuisine were altered forever with the arrival of the Spanish colonists. The ensuing Columbian Exchange saw an array of new foods introduced to North America. At the same time, staples like potatoes found themselves settling into the diets of those across the world. Thus, foods such as beef — that are now thought of as quintessentially American — became established on the continent.

From then through to the modern day, chefs have worked with these ingredients. In doing so, they've helped transform American food into a cuisine influenced by many different cultures. While everyone who cooks American food has been a part of this process, there have been a few chefs with a larger impact. Here is a closer look at fifteen of those cooks.

Edna Lewis was an American-born chef and food writer. During her lifetime, she had a huge impact on American cuisine. She did this, in part, by serving amazing Southern food at her friend's restaurant, Café Nicholson, in New York City. Lewis cooked at Café Nicholson starting around 1950, turning out dishes like fried oysters, Virginia ham, and chocolate soufflés. Such distinct cooking brought a host of famous guests to the restaurant, including the likes of Salvador Dalí and William Faulkner.

Cooking provided the basis for Lewis' culinary career, yet her greatest impact didn't come through working with pots and pans, but pen and paper. After suffering from a fall in the late 1960s, Lewis began writing recipes. Her first cookbook "The Edna Lewis Cookbook" was released in 1972. Her second book, "The Taste of Country Cooking," highlighted how brilliant food was being made by Black communities in the country's south.

"The Taste of Country Cooking" not only prompted an acceptance of both Black and Southern cooking but also seasonal eating. Chef Alice Waters illustrated this to The New York Times: "She showed the deep roots of gastronomy in the U.S. and that they were really in the South, where we grew for flavor and cooked with sophistication. I had never really considered Southern food before, but I learned from her that it's completely connected to nature, totally in time and place."

If Jean-Louis Palladin is the father of America's farm-to-table movement, Alice Waters is the movement's mother — and her famed restaurant Chez Panisse its home. Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 after a trip to France opened her eyes to how other cultures were connected to the land and food in a way that fast food-fuelled America was not. Her restaurant set off a revolution, first in California and then nationwide. Now it is commonplace for restaurants to only cook local, seasonal food and to name farms and producers on menus. Waters and Chez Panisse started these practices.

Whereas chefs like Palladin solely relied on their food to do the talking, Waters, as an activist, has turned to charities and education. She founded The Edible Schoolyard Project in 1995, a nonprofit that uses organic school gardens and food spaces to teach children the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community. In an interview with Forbes, Waters explained why teaching children to grow and cook their own food was important: "It's the best way we can address climate because we're educating the next generation. It's more important than it has ever been."

To say America's cuisine has been influenced by other countries' cooking would be an understatement. For far too long, however, foreign cuisines have been oversimplified, disregarded, and even demeaned in America. Often it falls to individuals to right these wrongs and re-educate the American populace about foreign cuisine. Cecilia Chiang was one individual who did so.

Chiang was born in China. After running a successful restaurant in Tokyo, Chiang moved to San Francisco in 1960. Her restaurant, the Mandarin, opened shortly after. Early on, Chiang decided to turn her back on the popular Chinese-American dishes of the time, like chop suey. Instead, the Mandarin served authentic Northern Chinese dishes. Highlights of the menu included tea-smoked duck and moo shu pork.

Chiang's impact on Chinese food in America was immense. Not only did she introduce Americans to traditional Chinese cooking, but she also created the blueprint for Chinese restaurants to provide excellent service as well as food. She continued to hold restaurants to high standards long after she had retired, as she highlighted in an interview with SFGate.

Although Julia Child did not work in a professional restaurant, she had the training and experience of a chef. The former she gained by studying at the famed Parisian culinary institution Le Cordon Bleu. The latter was earnt by running a cookery school known as L'École de Trois Gourmandes alongside Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

Of course, Child's greatest moment came with the publishing of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" an over 700-page cookbook first published in 1961. This book, co-authored by Beck and Bertholle, was the first that made French cuisine accessible for American home cooks. What's more, the recipes and the ethos they represented were in contrast to the American cooking of the time which prioritized artificial and processed ingredients.

Child also used television to spread her message of wholesome French cooking. Starting on PBS, Child's cooking shows became a mainstay of American television, loved for both their informative nature and Child's entertaining personality. Geoffrey Drummond, a TV director who worked with Child explained the impact of her shows to Epicurious: "Julia really had a kind of double legacy. She brought respectability to real cooking in the kitchen to the American home for a whole generation. And so for many of those people, it was almost as if Julia had given them permission to pursue something in the food world ... She really was a mentor to many generations, from home cooks in this country to our top chefs."

David Chang's Momofuku empire has become so embedded in America's food scene that it is almost hard to remember a time without it. Chang's career took off with the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar, a small restaurant that specializes in serving Japanese noodles. This approach, and the success that has sprung from it, is Chang's greatest impact on America's food scene. 

A similar sentiment was highlighted by chef Joaquin Baca to The Washington Post: "People like us used to think that the only way to run a restaurant was the big model, the old school, the fine dining, and what Momo did was to break that mold ... Early on, we had so much industry crowd, we had chef de cuisines and sous-chefs from some of the most notable restaurants in the city, who would come in, and they were looking at us, like, pulling it off, and they were like, 'F— it, I can do this, too'."

Chang has also established himself in the media. He co-founded the short-lived but highly impactful magazine, Lucky Peach, and has been featured in a variety of television programs, including the Netflix hit "Ugly Delicious." Similarly to Bourdain, Chang uses food in these creative outlets to have bigger discussions on food culture and society.

Thomas Keller is a titan in America's gastronomic world. This is partly attributed to his incredible success. The American chef leads two restaurants — The French Laundry and Per Se – that have both been awarded three Michelin stars. Coupling excellent French technique with incredible ingredients is the hallmark of Keller's cooking, but it's not the basis of his greatest influence. Rather, this comes in the form of mentoring.

Keller is an enthusiastic and dedicated mentor responsible for improving the careers of numerous chefs and food industry professionals. He explained his view on mentorship to FSR Magazine: "Mentorship is something that can be brief, and mentorship can be lasting. Mentorship can turn around—your mentee can become your mentor in the future. But one of the things we always talk about is our ability to remove our egos from the equations and appreciate the effort we're making toward one another ... what happens is quite extraordinary. That person becomes better than you. If that doesn't happen you haven't done a good job."

The list of Keller's mentees demonstrates the enormous influence his teachings have had on American — and global — cuisine. They include Corey Lee, the first Korean chef to earn three Michelin stars, molecular gastronomy chef Grant Achatz, and co-owner of Noma René Redzepi.

No chef has done more for sushi in America than Nobu Matsuhisa, the Japanese chef that first caused a storm with his Los Angeles restaurant Matsuhisa. Matsuhisa opened his namesake restaurant in 1987 and won instant fame for his unique style of sushi that incorporated elements of Peruvian cuisine.

While the dishes served at Matsuhisa, and the many Nobu restaurants that followed, changed sushi forever thanks to their flavor, Matsuhisa himself changed the process of sushi making by developing his own ten-finger, six-step technique. Matsuhisa highlighted this technique to The Peak: "My technique for making sushi involves using all ten of my fingers. It is a very delicate yet simple process, but it is also very difficult to master. The trick is you need to firmly but gently shape the sushi with the sushi rice to the point you can still see light passing through the sushi." With around 50 Nobu restaurants spread around the world, Matsuhisa's cooking technique has not only changed sushi in the U.S. but around the globe.