Jonathan Kung

KUNG FOOD is Jon Kung's cookbook rooted in Chinese American cooking and family culinary heritage. It connects directly to his Third Culture Cooking philosophy, exploring how growing up between cultures shapes the way people cook, eat, and find identity through food.

Third Culture Cooking is Jon Kung's signature framework for food — it draws on the experience of people raised between two or more cultural worlds, treating culinary traditions as something to blend and evolve rather than preserve unchanged. For Jon, it means approaching Chinese cooking techniques and ingredients as a living, cross-cultural language rather than a fixed canon.

Yes — before the COVID pandemic, Jon ran a private underground-style kitchen in Detroit, a supper club or secret dining setup. It served as the foundation for the small restaurant he was actively planning to open, a project that got derailed when the pandemic hit.

Jon had been on track to open a small restaurant in Detroit when COVID upended the hospitality industry. He pivoted to full-time content creation instead and has since built a following of well over a million people across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Jon Kung's content and identity are deeply rooted in Chinese American cooking — his cookbook KUNG FOOD centers on that heritage, and his most consistent hashtags include #chinesecooking. His Third Culture framing reflects a hyphenated or cross-cultural background, though he defines himself more broadly than any single label.

Jon has a sponsored partnership with Lee Kum Kee USA, the iconic Hong Kong–founded brand best known for oyster sauce and a wide range of specialty soy sauces. In his sponsored content for them, he's gone deep on their specialty soy sauce lineup — a natural fit given his focus on Chinese cooking ingredients and technique.

Yes — Jon is openly and consistently political for a food creator. His posts regularly include hashtags like #nokings, #fucktrump, and #50501, the latter tied to anti-authoritarian protest organizing. He's one of the more politically vocal macro-tier food creators on TikTok and Instagram.

Jon has used the #asahipartner hashtag in his content, signaling a paid partnership with Asahi, the Japanese beer brand. The collaboration fits naturally alongside his broader focus on Asian food culture and cooking.

Yes — "Rating Every Grocery Store Dumpling" is one of Jon's recognizable content formats, in which he taste-tests and compares packaged dumplings sold at mainstream supermarkets. It's a popular series that combines his Chinese cooking expertise with the kind of accessible, everyday product content his audience actively searches for.

Jon Kung is based in Detroit, Michigan, and the city is central to his creator identity — he consistently uses the #detroit and #313 hashtags, and both his former secret kitchen and his planned restaurant were Detroit-based projects. He describes himself as a Detroit chef in every platform bio.