101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die

The single best starting point for cooking across multiple Asian cuisines at home. Chef Jet Tila grew up half Chinese, half Thai in the food-obsessed neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and this book distills decades of professional and family cooking into 101 recipes that cover Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indian dishes.

Why Start Here

Most Asian cookbooks focus on a single cuisine and assume you are already comfortable with the pantry and the techniques. Tila does neither. He hops between traditions freely, giving you pad thai alongside pho, Korean BBQ short ribs next to Japanese miso black cod, and Chinese lo mein beside Vietnamese banh mi. The recipes are written for home cooks who shop at regular grocery stores and want dinner on the table in under an hour.

What makes this book genuinely useful for beginners is Tila’s approach to teaching. Every recipe comes with chef tips on flavor, technique, and ingredient sourcing. He explains why you toast spices before grinding, how to get proper wok hei on a home stove, and which shortcuts actually work. The tone is relaxed and confident, like learning from someone who has cooked these dishes thousands of times and wants you to skip the mistakes he already made.

The book was named one of the Top 10 Cookbooks of 2017 by the Los Angeles Times and has sold over 150,000 copies. It earned that reputation by being genuinely practical: the recipes work, the ingredient lists are realistic, and the results taste like they came from a restaurant.

What to Expect

A compact, photo-rich book at 192 pages that moves quickly from dish to dish. The difficulty is low to moderate, with most recipes requiring basic knife skills and a willingness to stock a few Asian staples like fish sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil. Tila organizes the book by cuisine rather than course, which makes it easy to explore one tradition at a time or jump between them. This is a book you will cook from on weeknights, not just read on the couch.