For Ming, the best meals are about who’s gathered around them. He believes “the best way to dine is everyone’s at the table.” Ming’s love of family-style dining shows in his tradition of tableside carving; the holiday roast comes out whole so everyone gets the piece they like. That welcome extended to the festival, when he hosted roughly 60 visiting chefs, sous chefs and partners at his home. “I was so honored to have almost all the chefs over to my house,” he said.

Chef Ming’s passion for cooking dates back to age 10, when he made fried rice for visitors at his family’s home in Dayton, Ohio. They took a bite and smiled. “I can make people happy through something that I can do and actually like doing,” he said. “And it’s to this day the reason I’m a chef.”

Ming has continued to impress since that initial meal. He won an Emmy in 1998 for Food Network’s East Meets West, hosts PBS’s longest-running cooking show, Simply Ming, and became Iron Chef Tsai on Netflix in 2022. The James Beard Foundation named his Blue Ginger one of 1998’s best new restaurants and named him Best Chef Northeast in 2002. Today he’s chef and partner at Baba in the Yellowstone Club.

For Ming, community matters beyond the culinary world. After his wife, Polly, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, he founded MingsBings, a plant-based line of Bings, aiming to create health-conscious “food as medicine. He has also raised millions in partnership with the Hawai’i Food and Wine Festival to support local culinary and agricultural education programs, scholarships, and student training across the islands.