The greatest things often come by surprise. In 2001, Brooklyn-born Chef Edward Lee was on a road trip when he stopped in Louisville, KY en route to seeing the Kentucky Derby. What started as a pit stop turned into a career—so taken with the area, food and local culture was Lee that he packed his bags, left his friends, family and burgeoning culinary career in NYC and began working at Louisville’s 610 Magnolia. “When I came to Louisville I didn’t think I was going to stay. My plan was to stay for 6 months and then return to NYC but once I started to plant roots in the area, it was obvious to me that there was something special here,” says Chef Lee. “The traditions of Kentucky were a great foundation from which to grow from. And the people here were food obsessed but also craving something more and different. I saw an opportunity and I'm glad that I stuck with it.”

Some 20-odd years later, Chef Lee has carved out a name for himself as one of the pioneering contemporary chefs in the country. Fusing the Korean cuisine that he grew up with the classic flavors of down home Southern cooking, Chef Lee owns multiple restaurants, has been nominated four times by the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef: Southeast, appeared on prominent television programs and has published several cookbooks, including 2024’s Bourbon Land. This November, Chef Lee is coming to the Gulf Coast for the Off the Page Literary Celebration hosted by Sarasota County Libraries and Historical Resources.

Although Chef Lee has adopted Kentucky as his home state, he is, in many ways, still nomadic in nature. In Bourbon Land, just as in the rest of his ‘cookbooks’, he uses food as a form of cultural currency–recipes are not just a list of ingredients or directions on how to prepare a dish, they are stories in and of themselves, histories of people past and present. It is the wielding of this knowledge that allows Chef Lee to be the kind of person, both inside and outside of the kitchen, that he wants to be. Yes, his creativity and talent as a chef are what have paved the way for much of his professional success—you don’t get to be a judge on Gordon Ramsey’s Top Chef or cook for the White House State Dinner in 2023 by not being one of the industry’s top talents—but it’s his understanding and respect for the culture of these cuisines that allow him to be a true trailblazer. Without that understanding, he wouldn’t have so deeply entrenched himself in the Louisville community. He wouldn't have shut down his restaurant Milkwood in 2020 and used the kitchen space to create the McAtee Community Kitchen to help feed neighboring communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. He wouldn’t have co-founded the Lee Initiative, a program devoted to increasing diversity and equality in professional kitchens. And he surely wouldn’t have used his platform to tell the stories of those around him, with food and cuisine being the connecting thread. Knowing that what's on the plate is just the tip of the iceberg is what makes Chef Lee more than a chef—it makes him a storyteller, a cultural connector and above all, someone worth listening to.