Celia's Bio

Celia Cheng launched Cravings in 2005 as a guide to satiating food cravings and to share restaurant recommendations. Cravings enabled her to combine her passion for dining, traveling, writing and design. She has also been able to utilize her expertise and experience from her management consulting and online advertising background to develop Cravings into a full-fledged online magazine. Celia holds a B.A. in Japanese Studies from Columbia University and an M.F.A. in Design from the School of Visual Arts. Raised between Taiwan and Hawaii, and having lived and worked in Japan, she is fluent in both Chinese and Japanese.

EDITOR’S NOTE

From as far back as I can remember, every meal our family enjoyed focused on the balance of food groups, taste, smell, colors and ingredients. My father loves to eat and cook. Even to this day, on weekends when he has time, he will spend most of it in the kitchen concocting tasty delights for the family. Of course, this is in Taiwan, and a standard meal there is different from any in the rest of the world. However, from a young age, I was taught to take notice of the intricacies of dining, whether in or out, and that is something I do now wherever I am.

Part of my childhood was spent in Hawaii, where the food is eclectic, with heavy pan-Asian influences. The variety of foods and the unique ways they are fused to create new dishes opened my eyes and taste buds.

Later, when I lived in Japan, I picked up the Japanese fanaticism of analyzing food to an extreme. This is a culture that prides itself on perfection and thoroughness. The Japanese are patient and willing to wait in long lines for hours to get a taste of a reputable eatery. They have endless TV food programming devoted to comparison, searches, and competitions on culinary perfection. Iron Chef is one show that might be familiar to the American audience. Another show performs blind tastings of specific foods such as curry bread, made from bakeries across Japan, and the contestants must name which bakery each bread is from. Amazingly, someone always manages to win. This obsessive food behavior is perfectly common and accepted in Japanese society and one of the many things I love about them. During the five years I lived there, I learned to crave many foods, but developed a particularly strong passion for soba (buckwheat noodles). I went on my own little pilgrimage to find great soba, trying highly recommended soba restaurants around Tokyo and its periphery. I became able to discern which restaurant had the freshest noodles, the best wasabi, the tastiest dipping sauce, etc.

When I returned to New York in 2000, a Japanese friend whom I had been staying with gave me guidance to find good restaurants while I refamiliarized myself with the city. She told me, “Every morning when I wake up I know what I want to eat that day. Once I figure out what my [craving] is, then I know exactly which restaurant I’m going to, because I know the places that prepare that dish well.” The girl was a foodie and I trusted her taste. She left New York soon after, so I lost an eating buddy, but I have followed in her footsteps and strive to explore and satiate each craving I develop.

Eating is not only enjoyment but also work. Food lovers like me are driven by passion and curiosity, always interested in new places and the reasons why they are recommended (we seek to validate recommendations, or confirm our suspicions). We are willing to travel far to discover perfection. We are obsessive and are willing to keep trying different burger joints to find the perfect burger — not the place with the best patties, the best melted cheese, the best buns, or the best texture, but the combination of all of the above. In this site, I have done this work for you.