J. Kenji López-Alt

James Kenji López-Alt, born James Kenji Alt on October 31, 1979, is an American chef and food writer. He is known for using the scientific method in his cooking to improve popular American recipes and explain the science of cooking. López-Alt first gained prominent recognition through his column titled The Food Lab on the Serious Eats website, which he later expanded into a successful cookbook.

López-Alt was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to geneticist Frederick Alt and Keiko Nakanishi. He is the maternal grandson of Japanese organic chemist Koji Nakanishi. He grew up alongside his sisters in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, living one floor above his maternal grandparents. After attending the Dalton School, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with a degree in architecture.

His culinary career began during his sophomore year of college when he took a job as a prep cook at a local restaurant. He later worked with several Boston chefs, including Barbara Lynch and Ken Oringer. López-Alt went on to work as a test cook and editor at Cook's Illustrated magazine and America's Test Kitchen. He eventually served as the Managing Culinary Director and Chief Culinary Consultant for Serious Eats.

In September 2015, López-Alt published his first cookbook, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. The book became a New York Times Bestseller and earned the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for General Cooking, along with awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. In 2017, he co-founded Wursthall, a beer hall style restaurant in San Mateo, California, alongside partners Adam Simpson and Tyson Mao. He left the restaurant in 2022, and the business announced its closure in September 2025.

López-Alt launched a YouTube channel in 2016 featuring unscripted point-of-view demonstrations of recipes and techniques filmed in his home kitchen. In September 2019, he became a monthly columnist at The New York Times Cooking. He released a children's book titled Every Night is Pizza Night in 2020, which debuted on the New York Times Children's Bestseller list.

After moving to Seattle in late 2020, López-Alt gained popularity for his Instagram recommendations of local businesses, eventually launching a project to review Seattle-style teriyaki restaurants. In 2022, he published a 658-page cookbook titled The Wok: Recipes and Techniques. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times Bestseller list, won the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and earned López-Alt his second James Beard Foundation Award in the Single Subject category.

In his personal life, López-Alt married software engineer Adriana López in 2009, and the couple combined their surnames. They have two children together, though López-Alt referred to Adriana as his ex-wife in a March 2025 interview. As of 2021, he resides in Seattle, Washington. In December 2024, he disclosed that he has been in recovery from alcoholism since October 2023. He also continues to appear as a guest on the Serious Eats podcast, Special Sauce.