Adrian Miller: Cooking to the President's Taste
James Beard Award winner Adrian Miller celebrates AAPI Heritage Month with stories of Asian heritage chefs who cooked for U.S. presidents at the White House.
Why we picked this
Miller's food history work consistently finds the people who cooked for power and were written out of the official record — this book recovers a specific and overlooked chapter of Asian American presence at the center of American political life.
Adrian Miller is a James Beard Award–winning food historian whose previous books have recovered the culinary contributions of Black Americans to the White House kitchen and to soul food more broadly. His new work turns to Asian heritage chefs who prepared food for U.S. presidents — at state dinners, at Camp David, in the private family quarters — a history that exists in official records and photographs but has rarely been told as a coherent story.
The timing is deliberate: the event falls during AAPI Heritage Month, and Miller’s approach is characteristically specific. He is interested not just in the dishes prepared but in the people who prepared them — their backgrounds, their career trajectories, the reception they received, and what their presence or absence from the historical record reveals about how America tells its own story.
Tattered Cover Colfax is Denver’s flagship independent bookstore, and this is a ticketed evening event that is likely to fill. Miller is an engaging speaker with a gift for making food history feel like the lived, contested thing it actually is.