Ming Tsai

Ming Hao Tsai (; born 1964) is an American chef, restaurateur, and television personality. Tsai's restaurants have focused on east–west fusion cuisine, and have included major stakes in Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Massachusetts (a Zagat- and James Beard-recognized establishment) from 1998 to 2017, and Blue Dragon in the Fort Point Channel area of Boston (a Zagat-recognized tapas-style gastropub named in Esquire Magazine "Best New Restaurants 2013"). Tsai hosts Simply Ming, a cooking show featured on American Public Television, in its seventeenth season. Past shows Tsai hosted include Ming's Quest, a cooking show featured on the Fine Living Network, and East Meets West. Tsai appeared in the Food Network cooking competition The Next Iron Chef (2010). Early life and education Tsai was born to Iris (née Lee), who owned a Chinese restaurant, and , an engineer who co-developed the Tsai-Wu failure criterion, and was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where he attended The Miami Valley School. He assisted with the cooking as he was growing up in the restaurant, Mandarin Kitchen. Tsai's maternal grandparents emigrated to Dayton from Taiwan after escaping China during the Cultural Revolution. Tsai later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then proceeded to study engineering and play varsity squash at Yale University. There, he was a member of the Phi chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. He received a master's degree in hotel administration and hospitality marketing from Cornell University in 1989. Either the summer after his sophomore or junior year at Yale, he attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Tsai speaks four languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish.