Vancouver native Emily Yuen has cooked in acclaimed fine-dining restaurants around the world, from Vue de Monde in Melbourne and the Michelin-starred Le Gavroche in London to db Bistro & Oyster Bar in Singapore. After nearly a decade abroad, Yuen moved to New York City, where she worked at Boulud Sud and the Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant Kajitsu. She later served as executive chef of Bessou in NoHo before opening Lingo, a Japanese American restaurant in Brooklyn, in 2023. Under her leadership, Lingo earned a place in the Michelin Guide, and Yuen was named a semifinalist for the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York State.
In February 2026, Yuen became executive chef of Yingtao, a Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant in New York City, after competing on Padma Lakshmi’s CBS cooking competition America’s Culinary Cup. At Yingtao, she draws on her Chinese heritage and international experience to shape the restaurant’s contemporary Chinese tasting menu.
The path to that career was far from obvious when Yuen was finishing high school in Vancouver. Culinary school was the only option that interested her.
“In high school I was always kind of failing and not giving a shit about anything,” says Yuen. “And then culinary school was something I actually cared about—top of my class, honor roll—I just knew that I wanted to be a chef.”
Her parents, however, were not initially thrilled with her decision.
“I just told my parents it was something in between, just to try it, and then they would keep asking me, like, ‘Oh, are you going back to school to do something else?’ and then I think eventually they gave up,” she laughs.
Yuen’s parents moved to Vancouver from the area around Guangzhou in southern China, and Chinese food defined the family’s meals both at home and when dining out. The family returned to China every couple of years to visit Yuen’s grandparents.
Despite that upbringing, Yuen spent more than a decade cooking French haute cuisine around the world. After moving to New York in the 2010s to work for Daniel Boulud’s restaurant group, she continued cooking French food. Her understanding of fine dining began to shift at Bessou, where she served as executive chef from 2016 to 2021 and immersed herself in Japanese American cuisine.
“It was a huge learning curve, but also at the same time I feel like Japanese and French cuisines have a lot of similarities,” she says. “I feel like I needed [French cooking] as a foundation, but I also feel like, back then, it felt like the only way to go, but nowadays, especially in New York, there’s a lot more fine dining restaurants that aren’t only French cuisine. Bessou was the first time I really realized that.”
By the time Yingtao co-founder Bolun Yao approached Yuen about leading the restaurant’s kitchen, she was already feeling the pull to cook Chinese food. Yao founded Yingtao with his wife, Linette Yao.
“It just felt like the right time for me … I don’t want to say that Japanese was the gateway, because it was closer to French food, but for me, I knew that I wanted to continue cooking Asian food and exploring that,” says Yuen. “I really believe in what Bolun and Linette are doing here for Chinese cuisine.”
At Yingtao, Yuen also hopes to expand young chefs’ understanding of what fine-dining training can look like.
“Hopefully Asian and non-Asian chefs can come into an establishment where they can have that type of [fine-dining] training, but it doesn’t need to be French food,” says Yuen.
