Hanoi-based food writer; editor-in-chief of Taste of Asia Guide.
📍 Hanoi, Vietnamwriting here since 20145 areas3 credentials
Mei Chen is the editor-in-chief of Taste of Asia Guide. She trained as a journalist at Hong Kong University, spent nine years at the Far Eastern Economic Review covering urban culture across the Mekong, and has been writing about food professionally since 2014. Her byline has appeared in Lucky Peach, Taste, and Eater. She lives in the West Lake district of Hanoi and cooks at home almost every night.
Recipes are not artefacts; they are arguments. Every bowl of phở is somebody's claim about what phở should be. My job is to record those arguments faithfully — the broth that was simmered eight hours by a grandmother in Nam Định is a different recipe from the broth pressure-cooked at the Hanoi Hilton, and both are honest. We try to write down the version a regular person can make and still recognise.
