Aliya LeeKong Biography
Aliya LeeKong is a television personality and the author of the cookbook Exotic Table: Flavors, Inspiration, and Recipes from Around the World – to Your Kitchen.
How old is Aliya LeeKong? – Age – Ethnicity
She is 43 years old as of 18 February 2021. She was born in 1978 in New York, United States.
Aliya LeeKong Family
Aliya is a first-generation American, the daughter of Indo-Pakistani and Tanzanian immigrants. She went on to work in New York City after graduating from Brown University and Columbia Business School, before discovering her passion for cooking.
Aliya LeeKong Husband
Aliya currently resides in New York City with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs. Sponsors for Educational Opportunity and The Family Center are both affiliated with LeeKong.
Aliya LeeKong Net Worth
She has an estimated net worth of $7 million.
Aliya LeeKong Education
Aliya attended Brown University and Columbia University before deciding to become a chef. She then attended the International Culinary Center in New York and honed her skills by staging and working on the line at prestigious restaurants such as Jean Georges, Per Se, and Junoon in New York City, as well as a number of small ethnic restaurants in and around the city. She was most recently Chief Culinar Officer.
Aliya LeeKong Cookbook
Exotic Table – Flavors, Inspiration, and Recipes from Around the World – to Your Kitchen, Aliya’s first cookbook, was released in 2013 and received widespread acclaim for making international flavors as familiar as they are exciting. Food & Wine magazine named Exotic Table “Best of the Best” in 2014; the prestigious award selects the top 25 cookbooks in the United States each year.
Aliya LeeKong Career
She most recently served as RealEats’ Chief Culinary Officer. Her passion for global home cooking has led her to travel extensively, with over 35 countries visited in the last 12 years alone in what she considers to be her ongoing culinary grad school. She attributes her breadth of knowledge across cuisines to the many friends, families, cooks, and chefs who have opened their homes, hearts, and kitchens to teach her some of the more undocumented cooking traditions – her best lessons came from being in new countries where she persuaded home cooks to allow her to spend time with them in their kitchens to learn their indigenous techniques, which she would never have learned or heard of in a book. Aliya, who is first and foremost an entertainer, spends the majority of her free time in the kitchen, cooking for friends and testing recipes inspired by her travels and family’s heritage.
She has also appeared as a guest chef on NBC’s Today Show, as a judge on the Food Network shows Kitchen Casino, Beat Bobby Flay, and Worst Cooks in America: Celebrity Edition, as a culinary expert on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and has been featured in publications such as Food & Wine, Vogue India, Shape, Oprah, Eater, and Food Republic. Aliya’s multicultural upbringing and world travels not only inspire her cooking but also educate her on global issues such as food and food security, women’s rights and roles, and children’s education. She is an outspoken advocate for issues ranging from food waste to food education to female empowerment in and outside of the hospitality industry.
