Lee Anne Wong

Q: Who is Lee Anne Wong? Lee Anne Wong is an American chef, restaurateur, television culinary producer, and television personality. A native of Troy, New York, she is the chef and owner of Koko Head Cafe in Honolulu, Hawaii and currently serves as the Executive Chef for Hawaiian Airlines. She is one of the most versatile figures in American food — equally accomplished as a restaurant operator, television producer, cookbook author, and airline culinary director.

Wong began her college education at the Fashion Institute of Technology studying fashion design, but later transferred to the professional cooking program at The French Culinary Institute. She began her culinary training at Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit before playing an integral role in the opening of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Chinese concept, Restaurant 66. She also worked side by side with Jacques Pépin for six years at The French Culinary Institute as Executive Chef of Continuing Education and Events, organizing, preparing, and executing his demonstrations and classes.

Wong was a contestant on the first season of Top Chef in San Francisco in 2006, and following her debut, was hired as the series' Supervising Culinary Producer for the next six seasons, helping to build the show into what it is today. She also defeated Marc Forgione in "Battle: Halloween Candy" on Food Network's Iron Chef America. Her television credits further include Top Chef All Stars Season 17, Chopped, Tournament of Champions Seasons 4, 5, and 6, and Unique Eats on the Cooking Channel.

In late 2013, Wong moved from New York City to Honolulu where in 2014 she debuted Koko Head Cafe — an island-style brunch house in the Kaimuki neighborhood — to popular acclaim, with Wong recognized on the cover of Honolulu Magazine, as well as in Bon Appétit and Food & Wine. The restaurant has since expanded internationally, with a Tokyo Station location opening in April 2023 and an Osaka Umekita location opening in September 2024.

Wong was nominated as a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef Pacific Northwest in 2022 for her work at Papa'aina at the Pioneer Inn in historic Old Lahaina, Maui — a restaurant that showcased her culinary travels while featuring locally grown and raised Maui ingredients.

In August 2023, Papa'aina perished in the Maui wildfires. Wong participated in the Maui recovery efforts despite losing her own restaurant, and continues to advocate for Maui and the small business community in Hawaii. Her resilience through that loss and commitment to the community she'd built are central to who she is as a chef and person.

Wong's cuisine sits at the intersection of her Chinese-American heritage, her New York fine dining training, and over a decade of deep immersion in Hawaiian and Pacific Rim ingredients. Since moving to Hawaii, she has become committed to sourcing as locally as possible, describing the ideas surrounding sustainability as having fundamentally changed for her given Hawaii's remote position and its history of importing the majority of its food. Her cooking brings technical precision from Michelin-level kitchens together with the warmth and accessibility that defines her brunch culture.

Wong released her first cookbook, Dumplings All Day Wong, in August 2014. The book covers potstickers, gyoza, mandoo, shumai, har gow, wontons, soup dumplings, bao, and jin dui — a comprehensive guide to Asian dumpling traditions rooted in her lifelong obsession with the form. A Koko Head Cafe brunch cookbook is also in development.

Wong brings a culinary perspective that almost no other chef working at Rotation's level can — the rigor of New York's elite French and Chinese fine dining kitchens, filtered through more than a decade of building a beloved restaurant culture in Hawaii and expanding it internationally to Japan. Her May 2026 residency at Rotation Napa marks one of the few opportunities for Napa Valley diners to experience her cooking outside of Hawaii — a convergence of Pacific Rim influence and wine country's seasonal bounty that doesn't exist anywhere else in the region.

Lee Anne Wong holds her chef residency at Rotation Napa in May 2026, located at Oxbow Public Market in downtown Napa, California. Rotation Napa is Napa Valley's only monthly rotating chef residency, bringing nationally recognized culinary talent to an intimate, evolving dining room for one month at a time. Reservations are available through the Rotation Napa website.