Ligaya Mishan

Chief Restaurant Critic, The New York Times - New York, NY

Ligaya Mishan is a chief restaurant critic for the New York Times and has written about the intersections of food and culture for nearly two decades. Her work has included stories on the revival of taro cultivation in Hawaii, the history of poke and the joys of crack seed. The daughter of a Filipino mother and a British father, she grew up in Niu Valley, eating Spam and drinking Tang. She graduated from Punahou, studied English literature at Princeton and earned a master of fine arts in poetry at Cornell. She has won a James Beard Award and an Asian American Journalists Association Award, and twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards. Her pieces have been selected for the Best American anthologies in Magazine, Food, and Travel Writing, and her criticism has appeared in the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. She is the co-author, with the chef Angela Dimayuga, of “Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora” (2021).