Pomfret Magazine | Fall 2022

Staying Hungry With Ming Tsia

STORY BY Corrine Szarkowicz

PHOTOS BY Lindsay Lehmann

Between celebrating Lunar New Year at the White House and cooking for Taste of the NFL at the Super Bowl, Chef Ming Tsai stopped by the Pomfret Hilltop and spoke to our students as the 2022 Schwartz Visiting Fellow. Celebrity chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, entrepreneur, television host, and philanthropist, Tsai lectured about staying hungry and the importance of kindness.

"Truly successful people are always hungry,” shared celebrity chef Ming Tsai, “There’s always more to learn.” The 2022 Schwartz Visiting Fellow told faculty and students he is always hungry. “I wake up hungry,” he said. Tsai is hungry to leave the world a better place, spread kindness, and give back. Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, Tsai spent most of his time in the kitchen of his parent’s family restaurant. At age six, Tsai displayed an entrepreneurial spirit by baking and selling Duncan Hines cakes to his neighborhood friends. At age ten, he successfully made fried rice for some unexpected house guests. While at Phillips Andover, he concocted a tasty treat for himself and his friends by experimenting with air fryer popcorn, squeezable vegetable oil, and a hairdryer, and created his first original recipe.

Tsai was always cooking. In between his years studying engineering at Yale, he traveled to France. There he learned French, attended the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and served as an apprentice in various kitchens. It was no surprise to his parents when he announced that he did not want to become an engineer — but a chef. They could see that he had a passion for cooking. “You will never be good at anything if you don’t love it. Follow your passion,” encourages Tsai.

“You cannot be a success until you truly fail.”

After graduating from college, Tsai trained under chefs in Paris and Osaka before earning his master’s degree in hotel administration and hospitality marketing from Cornell University. He worked for numerous restaurants and had some setbacks along the way. After spending six months setting up a new restaurant as the managing director — he was summarily fired. Again, after working for two years and putting a restaurant back on the map — getting them a 27 Zagat rating, he was abruptly fired. “You cannot be a success until you truly fail,” imparted Tsai. These setbacks only fueled him to open Blue Ginger, the East-West restaurant outside of Boston. “My wife asked me to stop getting fired all the time. So, I opened Blue Ginger. If you are a chef-owner you cannot fire yourself,” joked Tsai. It was a risk to open a city restaurant in the suburbs, but it paid off. The restaurant was soon named a James Beard Foundation Best New Restaurant nominee. In 2002, Tsai was named the James Beard Foundation Best Chef in the northeast — something he considers one of his biggest professional accomplishments.

Another proud moment for Tsai was when he helped raise a million dollars for the victims and survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing. Along with Chef Ken Oringer, the Boston Red Sox, ARAMARK, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Tsai gathered one hundred chefs in Fenway for the fundraiser and tasting event Boston Bites Back. “It really shows what you can do when you unite and want to do a huge act of kindness,” said Tsai.

This fundraiser was not Tsai’s first act of kindness. Since 2010, he has raised over $10 million for Family Reach, a nonprofit dedicated to removing the financial barriers between cancer patients and their treatment. “One of the greatest things I’ve ever done in my life is getting involved with Family Reach,” shared Tsai, who is now the chairman of the National Advisory Board of the organization. “Everyone can give back. You just need to find your platform.”

Tsai continues to give back and build his platform. He has starred in numerous television shows, including “East Meets West”, his Emmy Award-winning show “Simply Ming” — which has been on the air for eighteen seasons, and most recently, Netflix’s “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.” While he was resistant at first, he has accumulated more than 200 million views on his social media channels. “My goal is to build my platform strong enough that I can continually give back. I know that is why I was put on this planet. I’m absolutely wasting my time if I don’t make a difference,” said Tsai. “It’s all about building a brand that can just do more good.”

“Eat good. Feel good. Do good.”

A new project that Tsai has been working on since 2020 — MingsBings — is all about doing good; it is in their mission, “Eat good. Feel good. Do good.” MingsBings are a plant-based pocket and a unique twist on a traditional Chinese flatbread that originated in the Ming dynasty of China. Made with recognizable ingredients, MingsBings can be found in the freezer aisle in more than 2,000 stores nationwide. Inspired by his frustrating experience trying to find vegan options in the grocery store after his wife’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, he created the product to be prepared and eaten on the go. A portion of all proceeds benefits Family Reach and the DanaFarber Cancer Institute — a world leader in adult and pediatric cancer treatment and research and where his wife received her cancer treatment.

While promoting MingsBings on morning talk shows in 2020, Tsai reminded people about the importance of giving back, leaving the world a better place, and spreading kindness. While the world was fighting to flatten the Covid curve, Tsai was fighting to raise the kindness curve. He would say, “as long as the kindness curve is steeper than the Covid curve, we will get through this.”

Tsai continues to spread kindness wherever he goes. Before leaving Pomfret, he asked the students to take the #bekind pledge — a pledge to be kind every day. “We can all do this. We have to do this. You are the reason this world is going to be a better place,” said Tsai. In his closing, he also encouraged them to never stop being hungry. “If you stop being hungry, your life stops. We have to always want to be hungry,” he conveyed. “You have to leave your mark. It’s important!”

The 2023 Schwartz Visiting Fellow will be Jessica Bruder. Bruder is a journalist who writes about subcultures for publications such as The New York Times, WIRED, and Harper’s Magazine. She is known for her book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which was adapted into an Academy-winning film in 2020.

Since 1989, world-renowned experts have visited Pomfret School under the auspices of the Schwartz Visiting Fellow Program. This speaker series is the result of the vision and generosity of Michael Schwartz ’66 and Eric Schwartz ’69. Past fellows include animal science professor Temple Gradin, author Bill Bryson, human rights activist Madame Jehan Sadat, historian David McCullough, and journalist, author, and national security analyst Peter Bergen.