For more than 25 years Susanna Foo has changed the paradigm of Chinese food melding traditional Chinese foods with classical French techniques. With two cookbooks and two internationally known restaurants, this two-time James Beard Award winner is widely recognized as one of America’s top Chinese chefs. She does not believe that authenticity and improvisation are incompatible, and she is not hemmed in by national or regional boundaries. Her own cooking style is as Western as it is Chinese. Many Asian cuisine aficionados credit Foo with having brought Chinese food into the modern realm.

Susanna Foo was born in Inner Mongolia, China and raised in Taiwan where she educated herself on the spices, grains, and produce indigenous to the region. She came to the United States in 1967, not to pursue a career in the culinary arts, but to earn her M.A. degree in library science at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1979, Susanna and her husband, E-Hsin, moved to Philadelphia to join his family’s restaurant business and opened the Foo’s second family restaurant, Hunan in Center City Philadelphia. She met her mentor and teacher, the late Jacob Rosenthal, founder of the Culinary Institute of America, when she was at Hunan and learned French cooking from him. Rosenthal encouraged her to take course at the CIA. In 1987 Susanna and E-Hsin opened their own restaurant, Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine in Center City Philadlephia, and their vision became a reality.

Cooking has always been a family affair for Susanna. She learned Hunan style cooking from her mother-in-law, Wan-Chow Foo, and Chinese Northern-style pasta from her cousin, Chao Su. Her childhood spent living in different regions throughout China instilled her with an extensive knowledge of the country's varied culinary styles and ingredients. Training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, taught her new methods of preparation and exposed her to Western ingredients that mirrored Chinese items. She melds these two different influences beautifully and is one of the founders of Asian fusion cuisine.

Susanna's blend of fresh, seasonal ingredients, classical culinary techniques and Chinese cuisine quickly captured the attention of the culinary world. In 1988, Esquire magazine named Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine one of the country's best new restaurants; in 1989, Food & Wine named her one of America's 10 Best New Chefs. In 1995, she authored her first cookbook, Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine (Chapter Publishing), which received the James Beard Foundation's International Cookbook Award in 1996, and was followed in 1997 by her second James Beard Award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic Region. She also received the coveted Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence in 1999, and the restaurant she opened with husband E-Hsin has received the Four Star Mobil Travel Award every year since 1998, and was named to Nation’s Restaurant News’ Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 1997.

In November 2006, she opened Susanna Foo Gourmet Kitchen in Radnor Pennsylvania. The setting is chic and elegant.  The food is fun and family style with more of an emphasis of traditional Chinese cooking. Susanna wants to introduce people to Chinese food as one finds in China.

Nearly two decades after launching a career built on making Chinese food accessible to the American palate and elevating it to fine dining, Susanna now explores China's more exotic side. Every year, she returns to her homeland looking for new inspiration from places such as Inner Mongolia, Shanghai, Taiwan, and Beijing. Susanna has met Taiwan's most renowned chefs, Lin Chin Chen, Patrick Hsu and Show Pao Tseng. She has even found inspiration in some unusual places such as Tokyo Japan where she met two of the most inventive Chinese chefs, Iron Chef Kinichi Chen and Chef Shinji Kondou. Even after all this time Susanna’s cooking continues to evolve.