Jason Kwon

Jason Kwon is an American writer, former chef, and real estate investor. He spent a decade in professional kitchens, where he owned and operated restaurants in California, before moving into real estate private equity. His fiction draws on the worlds he knows best: restaurants, immigrant families, ambition, class mobility, faith, and the complicated distance between who we become and where we come from. His debut novel, Kitchen Barbarians, follows a Korean American financier who returns to his family’s failing restaurant and is forced to confront the life and family he left behind. Kwon holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree from Columbia University. He lives in Miami with his wife and two dachshunds. His work explores family obligation, masculinity, memory, and the cost of reinvention across generations in contemporary America.