Eddie Huang has a net worth of $2 million in 2024. The celebrity chef, author, restauranteur, and producer makes his money from the different endeavors he has been involved in over the years.
Huang is the owner of BaoHaus, a restaurant located in the East Village of Manhattan. The famous chef also functioned as the host of Huang’s World on Viceland. ABC adapted his autobiography, Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir, into a TV series of the same title by ABC. He is also involved in clothing and fabric design, all resulting in a substantial net worth for the celebrity chef. Eddie Huang’s parents, Louis Huang and Jessica are of Taiwanese origin. He has two younger brothers, Emery and Evan, who are tech founders.
Contributors to Eddie Huang’s Net Worth of $2 Million
The multitalented celeb has accumulated a tidy amount of money from his various profession. He has estimated annual earnings of $500,000, and his monthly income is estimated at $41k by several sources. Eddie Huang has a $2 million net worth with the potential to grow some more in the future.
Before he became Eddie Huang, the celebrity chef, he worked as an attorney at a law firm. He specialized in corporate law at Chadbourne & Parke. However, the global financial crisis of 2008 got him laid off, and Huang turned to marijuana dealing and stand-up comic for money.
While they paid the bills, they did not earn him his millionaire status. That took subsequent ventures like fashion design, chef and restaurants, book publishing, and television.
Fashion Design
Two years before he got fired, Eddie Huang had a side business working as a fashion designer. He ran the streetwear company Hoodman Clothing, which was once known as Bergdorf Hoodman. It was a modestly successful business, and Eddie worked alongside Ning Juang, an art director and a graphic designer he met in Taiwan. They ran the company for three years before he moved on to cooking, where he eventually found fame.
Eddie Huang’s Restaurant
If there is one word that summarizes Eddie’s journey to a $2 million net worth, it is ‘hustler.’ After his attempt at a traditional career failed, he tapped into various background knowledge and skill to make a living. One of those was cooking, which he learned from watching his mother cook at home.
He also learned from watching cooks and chefs of varying background work at his father’s restaurants. Armed with this knowledge, he opened his first restaurant, BaoHaus, in December 2009. The now-famous New York restaurant started as a Taiwanese bun shop but has since expanded its menu.
Eddie Huang once opened another restaurant, Xiao Ye, in New York City. However, despite an encouraging early start, his insistence on selling the controversial Four Loko drink forced it to close. BaoHaus followed suit in October 2020 after a ten-year run.
Television
With the exposure and popularity gained from his restaurants, Huang expanded to television. By the end of 2011, he began hosting Cheap Bites on the Cooking Channel. He also appeared in multiple episodes of Unique Eats, another show on the channel, before joining Viceland.
At Vice, he is now renowned for hosting the hour-long show Huang’s World, which began earning in April 2016. On the show, he travels to various parts of the world, exploring racial and cultural identity via food. The show has seen him travel to places like Sicily, Mexico, Jamaica, and Florida, among others.
Book Publishing
In early 2013, Eddie Huang added book publishing to his sources of income. In the early days of his career, he started the blog Fresh Off the Boat. As it grew popular alongside his restaurant, the publisher, Random House, agreed to turn his musings into a memoir with the same title.
The final product was released in 2013 to great critical reviews from The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Asides from earnings from his advance and royalties, the book made Eddie additional money when ABC optioned it for a TV show. The show Fresh Off the Boat began airing in February 2015 and spanned six seasons.
Eddie has since published another memoir, Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China. He published the book in 2016.
Aside from writing novels, Eddie has also written a film script. He wrote and directed the film Boogie. It began filming in August 2019 and will feature Pop Smoke, Taylor Takahashi, Dave East, and renowned actor Domenick Lombardozzi.
Eddie Huang’s Net Worth Also Sees Contribution from Fresh Off the Boat
Huang is famous for inspiring the popular show Fresh Off the Boat and owning the highly-rated restaurant, Baohaus. There is a third pillar to Eddie Haung’s fame, and it is controversy. Since he came into the spotlight, he has been involved in a few of them, mostly racially based.
- One of his first controversies was comparing the popular conference TED to a Scientology summer camp. He made the comments after he broke the terms of his TED fellowship by refusing to attend every event. Eddie had been named a fellow in 2013.
- In 2015, Eddie Huang got accused of misogynoir after comparing the emasculation of Asian men in America to the treatment of black women. The comments led to a fiery exchange with a Twitter user where he asked if they were dating and later asked her on a date.
- Not every controversy involving the celebrity chef had him as the guilty party. In 2016, he got arrested after standing up to right-wing extremists in Italy over the origins of beloved Sicilian foods. While filming an episode of Huang’s World in Sicily, a fight broke out when he shared that Sicilian foods like arancini, sesame seeds, and pistachio gelato have roots in North Africa.
- In another instance, he accused veteran comedian Steve Harvey of racism after the comic made a joke about the undesirability of Asian men among American women.
Perhaps most significant, at least on a personal level, was Eddie Haung’s admission to suffering sexual assault and domestic violence as a child. He confessed in the wake of the MeToo movement in 2017 following allegations against Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. The refusal of Fresh Off the Boat to tackle the issue is one of the reasons the chef is not a fan.
The Celebrity Chef is the Son of Taiwanese Immigrants
Eddie Huang is a Chinese-American, and his parents are of Taiwanese origin. His father, Louis Huang, and mother, Jessica, are of waishengren origin, a group of people that immigrated to Taiwan from mainland China in the late 40s. His parents’ ancestral homes are traceable to Hunan and Shandong in Mainland China, respectively.
Louis and Jessica Huang relocated to the US to Washington, DC. There, they gave birth to Eddie, whose real name is Edwyn Charles, on March 1, 1982. In the early years of his life, his family frequently relocated from Washington D.C. to Silver Spring, Maryland, Northern Virginia, and then Orlando, Florida.
At Orlando, his father earned a living managing a group of seafood and steak restaurants which include the likes of Cattleman’s Ranch Steakhouse as well as Atlantic Bay Seafood and Grill.
Growing up in Florida, Eddie loved African-American culture, particularly hip-hop. His combative personality also started in childhood, when he frequently got into fights and was arrested twice for assault.
His Siblings are in the Tech Industry
The celeb chef is not an only child. He grew up alongside two brothers – Emery and Evan Huang, who are younger than him by a few years. His brothers are businessmen with investments in real estate but later diversified into tech startups when they launched Batu Capital. With their latest venture, they plan on funding businesses in sectors like blockchain, cannabis, and crypto. The two are also into big data. Evan is also a co-founder of Baohaus.
One of Eddie’s brothers, Emery, won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize for science fiction writing. Eddie Huang also wrote about his brothers in his memoir, and they were featured in the resulting TV show. Forrest Wheeler played Emery, while Ian Chen played Evan.
