Jennie Low

Jennie Low, a native of Hong Kong, came to San Francisco as a girl, married, began a family, and devoted herself to developing her Chinese cooking skills as a way of bridging her old and new lives. She taught Chinese cooking for 20 years, and her courses included tours and demonstrations at many of San Francisco Chinatown’s leading restaurants, which led to her first cookbook, Chopsticks, Cleaver and Wok, followed by Jennie Low’s Szechuan Cookbook and The Flavor of Chinatown (co-authored with Brian St. Pierre). In 1992, she opened a restaurant, Jennie Low’s Chinese Cuisine, in Novato, north of San Francisco, and in 2007, another with the same name in Petaluma, in Sonoma County. Both feature traditional dishes from many regions of China, with menus personally supervised by Jennie. Late in 2013, she and St. Pierre revised and reissued their book as an e-book, The Flavor of Chinatown Revisited.