Soleil Ho

Coming Up

Restaurant service shaped the early frame of Soleil Ho’s criticism: kitchens in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, and Puerto Vallarta taught her how labor, pace, and judgment operate before a plate reaches the room. Those years sit behind the reporting and commentary, giving the writing an inside view of industry pressure and the social life built around food. The line between food writing and cultural criticism was already visible in the work that Soleil Ho co-hosted and co-founded in 2016 with the podcast *Racist Sandwich* at Racist Sandwich. The project gave her a format for moving between food, culture, and criticism without softening the harder questions around value, representation, and who gets to frame the story. Coverage at the *San Francisco Chronicle* in San Francisco followed that same range. As food critic from 2019–2023, Soleil Ho read restaurants and dishes as part of a broader civic field, where dining reflects policy, identity, labor, and taste all at once. Since 2023, that same critical method has carried into her work as an opinion columnist and culture critic of *San Francisco Chronicle*.

Where They Are Now

Opinion columns and cultural criticism at the *San Francisco Chronicle* are the current form of Soleil Ho’s practice. Her writing moves across food, travel, culture, and gender with attention to race, food policy, and the lived texture of San Francisco, treating each subject as something shaped by context rather than isolated taste. The result is criticism with a firm sense of what sits underneath the obvious surface. One of the clearest statements of that position comes from Soleil Ho herself: “Dealing with someone else’s culture, someone else’s media, and trying to Americanize it is something I can’t understand.” The refusal in that line is central to her work. It keeps the focus on translation, distortion, and the habits that flatten cultural exchange, and it leaves room for friction instead of easy resolution.

In Their Words “I don’t want to cut my lifespan too short by overdoing it, so I’ve been trying to keep the pace to about five or six places per week.” “Dealing with someone else’s culture, someone else’s media, and trying to Americanize it is something I can’t understand.”