A Marriage of Food and Fiction

In the kitchen with Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

- By Lucy Feldman. Photography by Tracy Nguyen

Knocking on the front door, it’s already clear that this is one of those dreamy California artist houses, its rich green paint and big windows lighting up a quiet street. Inside there are flowers on the bathroom shelf, music lilting in the background. And the kitchen! A jar of fresh cilantro sprigs on the table. The sea green backsplash, warm wooden cabinets, and the dangling strands of a pothos over the sink. It’s an unfriendly, blustery early-spring day out there in Los Angeles, but everything in here is inviting, most of all its inhabitants: the author and food journalist Rachel Khong and a sweet brown cat she and her husband call Bunny.

I was warned about this. A mutual friend told me about Khong’s cozy office, stacked high with books; about the persimmon tree outside; about, most of all, what happens in this kitchen: “She’ll woo you with her delicious things.” Tonight, I’m here to talk to Khong about her second novel, Real Americans, while making a dinner she planned for us—mapo tofu with pork and mushrooms, smashed-cucumber salad, and rice.

This marriage of food and fiction is only fitting for a writer whose career has been defined by both. Khong, 38, started in food service then came up in food media, an early staffer at Lucky Peach magazine under celebrity chef David Chang and his partner Chris Ying. After the magazine shuttered in 2017, she founded the Ruby, a co-working space for women and nonbinary creatives in San Francisco, making food and beverage programming a crucial element.

For all these reasons, people who know Khong’s work tend to arrive at her fiction with certain expectations. To some, her 2017 debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin, about a young woman caring for her father after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was brimming with food. To others, there wasn’t enough. Real Americans will inspire the same response.