Hey there!

My name is Soleil Ho, and beginning in 2019, I became The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. In 2022, I won the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award for my work at The Chronicle.

I wear a lot of hats: I’m a food, culture, and travel writer, and podcast host. My Chronicle podcast, Extra Spicy, won a Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features award in 2022. In 2016, I co-founded the multiple award-nominated Racist Sandwich, a podcast about gender, race and class and their intersections with food. I’ve written about assimilation food, my proto-feminist love for Sailor Moon, and the trouble with trademarking the word “aloha.”

In addition to all of that, I’m the co-writer of MEAL, a graphic novel on culinary mentorship, queer romance, and eating insects. My work has also appeared in the anthologies, Women on Food, The Best American Food Writing 2019 and The Best American Food Writing 2021. I’m currently working on The Memory of Taste, an upcoming cookbook by Oakland chef Tu David Phu, due out in 2023.

In 2018, I received a Southern Foodways Alliance Smith Symposium Fellowship and a UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.

My name is pronounced like this!

You’ll find me on Twitter @hooleil, on Mastodon, and on Instagram @soleil_ho.