A Taiwanese-American rebel restaurateur chronicles his rise to success from his difficult childhood in the American South to his decision to embrace all he had learned about food in his father's restaurants and his mother's kitchen to create his own culinary identity. - (Baker & Taylor)

NOW AN ORIGINAL SERIES ON ABC • “Just may be the best new comedy of [the year] . . . based on restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name . . . [a] classic fresh-out-of-water comedy.”—People
 
“Bawdy and frequently hilarious . . . a surprisingly sophisticated memoir about race and assimilation in America . . . as much James Baldwin and Jay-Z as Amy Tan . . . rowdy [and] vital . . . It’s a book about fitting in by not fitting in at all.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
 
Assimilating ain’t easy. Eddie Huang was raised by a wild family of FOB (“fresh off the boat”) immigrants—his father a cocksure restaurateur with a dark past back in Taiwan, his mother a fierce protector and constant threat. Young Eddie tried his hand at everything mainstream America threw his way, from white Jesus to macaroni and cheese, but finally found his home as leader of a rainbow coalition of lost boys up to no good: skate punks, dealers, hip-hop junkies, and sneaker freaks. This is the story of a Chinese-American kid in a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac blazing his way through America’s deviant subcultures, trying to find himself, ten thousand miles from his legacy and anchored only by his conflicted love for his family and his passion for food. Funny, moving, and stylistically inventive, Fresh Off the Boat is more than a radical reimagining of the immigrant memoir—it’s the exhilarating story of every American outsider who finds his destiny in the margins.
 
Praise for Fresh Off the Boat
 
“Brash and funny . . . outrageous, courageous, moving, ironic and true.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“Mercilessly funny and provocative, Fresh Off the Boat is also a serious piece of work. Eddie Huang is hunting nothing less than Big Game here. He does everything with style.”—Anthony Bourdain
 
“Uproariously funny . . . emotionally honest.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Huang is a fearless raconteur. [His] writing is at once hilarious and provocative; his incisive wit pulls through like a perfect plate of dan dan noodles.”—Interview
 
“Although writing a memoir is an audacious act for a thirty-year-old, it is not nearly as audacious as some of the things Huang did and survived even earlier. . . . Whatever he ends up doing, you can be sure it won’t look or sound like anything that’s come before. A single, kinetic passage from Fresh Off the Boat . . . is all you need to get that straight.”—Bookforum - (Random House, Inc.)

Eddie Huang is the proprietor of Baohaus. He hosts “Fresh Off the Boat” for VICE TV, hosted Cheap Bites for the Cooking Channel, and co-hosted episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s The Layover. He’s written for Eater.com, The New York Observer, Grantland, and his own popular blog. He lives in New York City. - (Random House, Inc.)

Booklist Reviews

Born in the U.S. to Taiwanese immigrant parents, Huang refuses to be a "lapdog under a bamboo ceiling," and his colloquial, furious memoir is as open about his struggling, screaming, sometimes abusive parents as it is about the prejudice he encounters growing up in Orlando and then in New York, where to this day "someone tells me to go back to China at least three times a year." He hates that everything he does is a statement about his people and where they are from, even as he refuses to be reformed, assimilated, apologetic. Always refusing to fit in, he wants to hurt people like they hurt him, and he succeeds. Now he runs a big New York City gourmet restaurant and a food store, and, throughout the book, food is front and center, including his mother's recipe for the best beef noodle soup. Readers will leave hungry, and many immigrants will recognize the refusal to go with the model minority myth. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

Up-and-coming celebrity chef Huang serves up a raw memoir recounting his life as an angry young man chafing under generations of stifling Chinese tradition and all-encompassing American "whiteness." Three things inform the multitalented restaurateur's identity: food, basketball and hip-hop. Although not necessarily in that order, each is infused in virtually every sentence, many of which are laugh-out-loud funny. All three provided the socially conscious author with the succor he needed to make it as an Asian "OutKast" growing up in the Deep South. The son of a former Taiwanese gangster father and a money-obsessed mother, Huang spent his formative years posting up with his style-obsessed buddies and generally bucking authority and the status quo. The author renders his portraits of his many colorful friends and family as vividly and spectacularly as his recipe for beef noodle soup. Huang may have an opinion on everything from religion to RZA, but his deeply contemplative nature deflects any accusations of self-righteousness. His history of violence is more problematic, however. Physical violence both on the streets and inside the home punctuated the author's younger years, and while the latter is thoughtfully unpacked and explored, the former is too often glorified. It could have all easily gone quite differently for Huang. At one point, he was arrested after driving a car into a crowd of threatening rivals and was packed off to Taiwan in order to escape punishment. However, he used the opportunity to reconcile his Asian heritage and focus his unrelenting energy on the things he really wanted out of life. The inspiring result became his trendsetting East Village eatery, Baohaus. A unique voice with a provocative point of view. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

Hipster restaurateur Huang takes the American dream and tilts it a few degrees off center in this rambling saga of his trek through a childhood and adolescence marked by hip-hop, law school, arrests, and a fair amount of troublemaking. He explodes the "model minority" myth in his chronicle of growing up as the problem child of a family of Taiwanese immigrants in a country where an Asian face causes a lot of preconceptions. What value stays with him all along? No spoiler alert is needed to say that it's a love of food. VERDICT While there is probably no other paean to that iconic Thanksgiving side dish—the green bean casserole—in recent literature, Huang's in-your-face delivery of his scramble to succeed will appeal to foodies out there who are too cool for school. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Huang, the founder of the popular East Village food shop Baohaus, tells his unconventional immigrant fable with his FOB ("fresh off the boat") parents and his unusual relatives living the Yankee dream. He traces his food jones to his father's restaurant in Orlando, Fla., wrestling with his Chinese identity, while embracing a love of old school hip-hop, Michael Jackson, Charles Barkley, and Jonathan Swift's satirical "A Modest Proposal." Writing with attitude, Huang details his journey from novice cook sampling Haitian ribs, Southern cooking, Japanese Izakaya wings, Bon Chon Korean fried chicken, and Taiwanese foods to opening his landmark eatery known for its fashionable, simple Asian street food. "I grew up in the excess of the Brat Pack–Madonna–Joe Montana–Michael Jackson 80s and the NWA–MJ–Nirvana–World Wide Web nineties, and we saw the residual battles from seminal cases like Roe v. Wade or Regents of the University of California v. Bakke," Huang writes. Brash, leading-edge, and unapologetically hip, Huang reconfigures the popular foodie memoir into something worthwhile and very memorable. (Jan.29)