Why 5 Million Home Cooks Love the 'Korean Vegan'

Attorney turned TikTok star Joanne Lee Molinaro brings depth and meaning to her lessons on plant-based Korean cooking.

Joanne Lee Molinaro practices radical honesty. Earlier this year, one day after the deadly massacre in Monterey Park, a predominantly Asian neighborhood of Los Angeles, in which a gunman killed 10 people at a ballroom dance club on the eve of the Lunar New Year, Molinaro sat down in front of her TikTok audience with a pot of tteokguk. “One day,” she said, “somebody will try to harm your church, your school, even your community. And in every single scenario, there will always be one person telling you, ‘You’re blowing this out of proportion.’”

She ladled the rice cake soup into a bowl and paused, looking straight at the camera. “That person ... they are eminently unqualified for a job that you weren’t even seeking applications for. So the next time some unqualified, incompetent, arrogant a—hole tries to weigh in on something for which they have zero experience, you fire them. And you have some tteokguk.”

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Candid voiceovers like these have earned Molinaro—who is better known by her social media moniker The Korean Vegan—an audience of nearly five million. Each of her cooking tutorials is accompanied by narration, often confessional, always emotional, in the background as her hands move across the screen, undressing cloves of garlic or nestling a tube of soon tofu in a burbling pot of ramyeon and urging it apart with a spoon until it separates into jiggly slices.

Molinaro has created a new class of cinema for the home cook, one that is as instructional as any Food Network half-hour and yet as likely to elicit tears as a heartbreak. Sometimes, as she prepares kimbap or kimchi-and-tofu-filled mandu, Molinaro talks about how she used to berate her body for its size. She talks about her first marriage (“Within a month of dating him, I knew that something wasn’t right; I believed my love was strong enough to heal all of the hurts he gave me”) and her imperfect relationship with her parents, and she tells stories about how it felt to fall in love with her second husband. (“Your love won’t ever be the same as their love. Yours is soft and hot; his is prickly and bent at odd angles.”)

Her mission isn’t necessarily to convert her audience to veganism. Her first priority, she says, is to induce compassion. “I started TikTok in 2020,” she says. “It felt like the world was on fire. I didn’t think that using social media to yell at people was effective; I thought it would be most effective to appeal to natural human instincts. ‘I hate feeling lonely. I hate feeling grief.’” The idea behind sharing her stories while she cooks is to find the things that are relatable and then pull on that to challenge the way people think about food.

It’s no surprise that Molinaro excelled at trial law for almost two decades before leaving to focus on The Korean Vegan full time. “It’s exactly what I think about when preparing for a jury,” she says. “My strength has never been bullying people. My strength has been building rapport.”

Meet the 2023 Food & Wine Game Changers

De La Calle Tepache | Dia Simms | Fry Away | Great Wrap | Heilala Vanilla | Induction Cooking | Joanne Lee Molinaro | Katie Jackson | Lisa Cheng Smith | Maui Nui Venison | Meherwan Irani | Reem Assil | Rockefeller Center | S.A.L.T. | Theaster Gates

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