Namiko Hirasawa Chen

Namiko Chen was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan. She grew up in a household filled with family preparing delicious food and her late grandfather owned a couple of teppanyaki restaurants in Osaka. Since elementary school, she spent almost every evening in her mother's kitchen helping her prepare dinner. Nami started cooking for herself when she came to California as a foreign student when she was 20 years old. When she got married and had two young kids of her own, she started a blog — Just One Cookbook — to record all these precious family recipes and to share them with her friends. Things quickly took off from there, and today, Just One Cookbook has evolved into the world's most visited Japanese recipe website in the world. Nami lives in San Francisco with her Taiwanese-American husband, two children, and their puppy Miso.