Where to Start with Jet Tila
Jet Tila is one of the most effective teachers of Asian cooking in America. Raised in a Thai-Chinese family in Los Angeles, he grew up in the kitchen of his family’s Bangkok Market, one of the first Thai grocery stores in the US. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu and the California Sushi Academy, then built a career that spans restaurant kitchens, Food Network, and multiple cookbooks. His gift is making the intimidating approachable: breaking down dishes from across Asia into steps that home cooks can follow without specialty equipment or a trip to three different grocery stores.
Start here
101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die
Jet Tila · 192 pages · 2017 · Easy
Themes: pan-asian cooking, fusion, weeknight meals, street food, technique
Tila’s debut cookbook and his best starting point. It collects 101 recipes spanning Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indian cuisines, all written for home cooks who want bold Asian flavors without spending all day in the kitchen. Named one of the Top 10 Cookbooks of 2017 by the Los Angeles Times.
Why Start Here
This is Tila at his most focused and generous. Each recipe is paired with a chef tip explaining the technique, the ingredient logic, or the cultural context behind the dish. The range is remarkable: you move from pad thai to pho to Korean BBQ short ribs without ever feeling like the book has lost its footing. Tila’s half-Thai, half-Chinese heritage shows in the natural ease with which he crosses between traditions.
The recipes are designed around what you can find at a regular grocery store, with honest notes about when a specialty ingredient is worth seeking out and when a substitution works fine. The cooking times are realistic and the instructions are clear enough for someone who has never cooked Asian food before.
What to Expect
A 192-page cookbook with vibrant photography and a relaxed, encouraging tone. Most recipes are weeknight-friendly, requiring 30 to 60 minutes of active cooking time. You will need to build a small Asian pantry (soy sauce, fish sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, sriracha), but Tila walks you through that process in the introduction. The book is organized by cuisine, making it easy to explore one tradition at a time or hop between them as the mood strikes.