Thai Chef Jet Tila’s Cookbook Cements His International Celebrity

He’s perhaps best known for his work on Food Network, where you’ll currently find him on six shows: “Cutthroat Kitchen,” “Chopped,” “Cooks Vs. Cons,” “Beat Bobby Flay” and “Chopped Jr.” He’s also the head of three restaurants around the country, he works with 1,400 schools and cafeterias through Compass Group, and he’s the Culinary Ambassador to Thailand. //localfoodeater.com/jet-tilas-enticing-first-cookbook-101-asian-dishes-need-cook-die/

Tila lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Ali, and their two children, Amaya and Ren.

Jet always starts off his life story by mentioning that his  family moved here in the ’60s. They were the first  Thais to come as a group and they established Thai food in L.A.  LA is now home to the largest Thai population outside of Thailand is in Los Angeles, and it all started then in 1966.

Two of Chef Jet Tila’s signature dishes

“My grandmother from my mom’s side was my first cooking instructor. She recognized pretty early I wasn’t going to do best in school. She put me in the kitchen and taught me the trade. She’d sit me next to her when she cooked dinner every night.

Then as I got older, I basically worked every role in our restaurants, from polishing silverware to dishwashing.  Then I worked every job in the market from produce to purchasing.  I hated it as a kid; I wanted to go hang out with my friends and eat things like meatloaf and pasta. I had no idea how lucky we were to eat everything made from scratch.

I finally realized in my 20s after dropping out of high school, slumming around. … I went to culinary school. My first job was with the L.A. Times food section under Russ Parsons. I wanted to understand how food journalism works. I wrote recipes and tried to be on the masthead from 1998 to 2000.

To round out this experience,  I went to Bon Appetit Management and worked at all the tech companies, came back to L.A.,

Barbara Hansen, Los Angeles Times Food Writer discovered Jet and wrote a story on him.  It was there

And the rest is history, including Jet’s fine dining experiences and continuing “always to teach.”  He then went to work for Steve Wynn in Vegas. “I had no idea what an opportunity this was,” he laughs.  When Wynn wrote down a number on a piece of paper as his potential salary,  Jet did everything not to gasp.  That was only the beginning.  He did the TV show, “Iron Chef” while he was there, and as importantly to Jet, “met the woman I wanted to marry.”