About Winnie Yee Books
Winnie Yee was born in a small town 60 miles north of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Her family, members of Malaysia's large Chinese community, emigrated to the Los Angeles area when she was 6. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from UCLA in 2003. Having grown up with Chinese-Malay live-fire cooking, she was inspired to devote herself to barbecue, teaching herself about a wider range of Chinese traditions beyond Chinese-Malay--including mainland Chinese and Chinese-American--and learning the art of Texas-style smoking. She opened her widely praised restaurant Smoke Queen BBQ as a delivery-only ghost kitchen in 2020 and shortly thereafter as a brick-and-mortar restaurant in Garden Grove, in Orange County. Remarkably, by 2021 she was already being lauded by the New York Times and other outlets as a major voice on the US BBQ scene. Aside from the restaurant, Smoke Queen serves up barbecue weekly at Smorgasburg LA in downtown Los Angeles.
