Francis Lam
American food journalist, cookbook editor and radio journalist
Francis Lam is an American food journalist, cookbook editor, and since 2017 the host of American Public Media's The Splendid Table.
Early life and education
Lam was born to Chinese immigrant parents living in New Jersey and working in Manhattan's Chinatown, where they operated a small garment factory. His mother wanted him to go to business, dental, or medical school. Lam remembers trying to hide his "stinky lunches" from schoolmates and that he "wanted to eat what white people ate."
Lam attended the University of Michigan, where he majored in creative writing and Asian studies, graduating in 1997. He graduated first in his class from The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in 2003.
Career
After graduating from Michigan, Lam moved back to New York and worked as a grant writer for non-profit organizations before attending CIA.
While at CIA, he wrote emails to friends describing his experiences. The emails got passed around, and he was contacted by an editor at Financial Times who had read some of them and asked Lam to write for the publication. In 2004 he met Ruth Reichl, then editor of Gourmet, and started freelancing for Gourmet.
In 2007 he received a contract from Gourmet for regular work. At the time he was living in Biloxi, Mississippi, working part-time for a non-profit helping with cleanup after Hurricane Katrina.
The public source identifies “Francis Lam” as american food journalist, cookbook editor and radio journalist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Francis, American and food.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65625603. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 1997, 2003 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Lam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.