Hetty Lui McKinnon

Hetty Lui McKinnon is an Australian Chinese Vegetarian/plant-based/vegan cookbook author, recipe developer, and James Beard Award finalist and winner. She has written five cookbooks with the fifth, Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds winning the James Beard Award for Vegetable Focused Cooking in 2024.

McKinnon was born in Sydney to Chinese immigrant parents from Guangdong, China.^[1] Her father immigrated in the late 50s and her mom arrived in the early 1960s.^[2] She has two siblings and is the youngest sibling.^[3]

McKinnon's father worked at the Flemington Markets as an importer and exporter of bananas.^[4] He brought fresh produce back for his family, which had a huge influence on McKinnon's later cooking.^[4] McKinnon's father died in 1989, when she was 15 years old.^[4][5]

McKinnon's Australian upbringing and cross-cultural experiences profoundly shaped her. She recalls feeling like a minority outside of her home while also growing up in a traditional Chinese household.^[6] McKinnon has stated that food was central to her family, calling it a "common language."^[6] Although McKinnon grew up eating her mother's Cantonese food, she did not really cook in her childhood.^[6]

At school, McKinnon's career advisor dissuaded her from becoming a journalist, which led to her initial stint in public relations.^[6]

In the early 2000s, McKinnon moved to London because her husband got a job there.^[1] She got a job at a PR agency.^[1] McKinnon resided there for four years before moving back to Sydney with her husband.^[1]

After her move back to Sydney, McKinnon was freelancing for a PR agency, but found herself gravitating towards cooking. When Mckinnon would put her children down for their naps, she would cook through Yotam Ottolenghi's first cookbook.^[1] She credits this as a major turning point that helped her fall in love with cooking, learn practical techniques, and layer flavors.^[1]

In 2011, McKinnon founded Arthur Street Kitchen, a community kitchen making salads that highlight local produce, in Sydney's Surry Hills neighborhood.^[4] She made salads and sweets out of her home kitchen and delivered them by bike throughout the neighborhood.^[1] The menu would rotate, ranging from salads she had been making for years to ones inspired by classic dishes.^[7] McKinnon emailed out a weekly menu to subscribers that featured two salads a day, making deliveries on Thursday and Friday for up to forty people.^[7]

After about a year, McKinnon decided to write a cookbook.^[1] McKinnon was inspired by people asking for her salad recipes, which taught her to develop and write recipes.^[1] She met the book's photographer, Luisa Brimble, during an interview with Broadsheet magazine, a Sydney-based magazine.^[1] In 2013, McKinnon self-published Community, which was initially just supposed to be for Arthur Street Kitchen's subscribers.^[1] However, after a feature in the Australian website The Design Files, McKinnon sold out of cookbooks.^[1] A publisher at Pan Macmillan saw her cookbook and published it throughout Australia, where it sold upwards of 80,000 copies.^[1] In 2015, Community was shortlisted for the 2015 Australian Book Industry Awards in the category of Illustrated Book of the Year.^[8]

In 2015, McKinnon moved to New York City's Carroll Gardens.^[1] There, she wrote her second book, Neighborhood, over the course of three months.^[1]

In 2017, McKinnon began publishing a multicultural food magazine called The Peddler Journal.^[1]

In 2018, McKinnon began a monthly column on ABC Everyday.^[9] She is also a regular contributor to New York Times Cooking, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, and Epicurious.^[10] She has been featured on the New York Times Cooking YouTube channel.

Her third cookbook, Family, focuses on "vegetarian comfort food."^[1] She was inspired by the crowd-pleasing meals she cooked for her children, which were much more kid-friendly than the salads she made for Arthur Street Kitchen.^[1] The book came out in 2019 and was awarded Best Illustrated Book of the Year in the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards.^[11]

Her fourth cookbook, To Asia, with Love, came out in 2020.^[12] McKinnon shot all the photos for this book on film.^[2] The book features easy Asian recipes and draws heavy influence from her experience as a third culture kid.^[13] In interviews, McKinnon discussed how this cookbook was a way for her to reclaim her Chinese Australian heritage and celebrate Asian food culture.^[13] In 2022, the book was a James Beard Award finalist.^[14]

McKinnon credits her fifth cookbook, Tenderheart, as a major way that she was able to process the emotions around her father's death.^[5] Originally, she planned to write the cookbook about her favorite vegetables, but felt gravitated to write about her father.^[3] Many of the recipes in the book incorporate foods that he loved, like garlic chile oil, adobo, and tater tots.^[15]

Her first cookbook, Community, is regarded as an Australian cult classic.^[16]

McKinnon's 2020 cookbook, To Asia, with Love, was a finalist for the 2022 James Beard Awards. ^[17] Her 2022 cookbook, Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds won the 2024 James Beard Foundation Award for Vegetable Focused Cooking.^[18]

• Community (2013) ISBN 9781760786571
• Neighborhood (2016) ISBN 9781743538982
• Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Foods to Nourish Every Day (2019) ISBN 9781760554576
• To Asia, with Love: Everyday Asian Recipes and Stories from the Heart (2020) ISBN 9781760787677
• Tenderheart: A Book about Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds (2022) ISBN 9780593534861

McKinnon has been vegetarian since she was 19 years old.^[4] In an interview, she stated that she had a general dislike of meat and went fully vegetarian once she started university.^[4]

McKinnon has three children.^[1][19]

• Official website