Soleil Ho
The story of Soleil Ho starts with their grandparents.
In this episode, meet and get to know the food writer and COYOTE Media Collective member who’s been on my radar since they replaced longtime Chronicle food writer and mysterious human Michael Bauer. In Part 1, we dive into Soleil’s family story.
It begins two generations back, when their grandparents came to the US from Vietnam in the Seventies. They were refugees from the US war in their homeland. On Soleil’s mom side, the grandparents brought Soleil’s mom and seven other children from Vũng Tàu to Freeport, Illinois. They had first ended up in a refugee camp in Arkansas. It wasn’t easy finding a new home for such a large family, but an older refugee from Nazi Germany who lived in Freeport took them in. Soleil’s mom was around 10 years old when she got to Freeport.
Soleil’s dad’s family comes from Central Vietnam. After the Viet Cong took over, they put his dad (Soleil’s paternal grandfather) in a re-education camp, where he remained for around 10 years. After that, he was released and was able to flee his homeland for the US to join his family (also a large one). They also ended up in Illinois, where Soleil’s parents eventually met.
The story of how their parents met goes something like this: The Illinois Vietnamese scene was relatively small, and folks mostly knew one another. By Soleil’s description, their maternal grandfather was “the guy,” meaning he threw parties and made connections. So their parents’ families just hung together, sometimes at big parties like at Lunar New Year, and there was always a lot of food.
It was a shotgun wedding, with Soleil present in fetal form. They have a younger sister and their parents are now divorced.
Soleil was born in 1987 in Illinois. Their mom had moved to Chicago to go to school there. Their earliest memories take place in Chicago, in fact. With two young parents working a lot to support their family, Soleil and their sister spent a lot of time with their maternal grandparents. They remember learning to make sandwiches in their grandparents’ kitchen.
Another early memory that I find fascinating and a little funny is of Michael Jordan individually wrapped hot dogs. It was Chicagoland in the Nineties, so it makes perfect sense that Bulls merch was everywhere. And that extended to food, remarkably.
There’s one memory from preschool involving contraband Gummy Bears. Fun stuff. As Soleil got a little older, they developed a love of vampires. In art classes, when asked to draw hand turkeys or Santas, Soleil would do so, but they would add fangs and bloody teeth.
Fast-forwarding a bit, Soleil says that around the time they went off to college, they realized that the family had moved around 20 times. They moved to New York City when Soleil was eight. Their mom worked in fashion and lived on the east side of Manhattan. From there, they moved to Brooklyn.
When I express awe at living in NYC in the Nineties, Soleil is quick to point out that this was Giuliani’s New York. Policies of that administration transformed much of the city, especially Manhattan. We’ll just leave it at that.
It was around this time that Soleil started to develop a “taste in food,” as they say. Their mom was now a single mom, working a lot, and like many families, they had the drawer full of take-out menus. Through this, Soleil learned about various Chinese cuisines, Indian food, and dishes from many other cultures, all represented right there in the kitchen.
After Brooklyn came a short stint in Long Island before returning to Brooklyn, where Soleil went to high school. They compare that school to Lowell here, where you have to test to get in and “all the smart kids” go.
With a quick, feeble calculation in my head, I ask whether Soleil starting high school around 9/11. They confirm and share their story of that day—suffice to say that they saw the whole thing happen in real time.
I ask whether they’re scarred from 9/11. Soleil says that, yes they are, but mostly existentially. Then they pivot to talking about how it brought about an end to illusion about the world, which is a net good thing. But seeing 9/11 in the greater context of conflict around the world really opened their eyes.
(Our second guest that day, Honey, seen in the first photo with Soleil above, took issue with a canine passer-by, which I’ve left in the recording because duh.)
September 11 led to Soleil’s becoming an activist anti-war person, starting in 2003 with Iraq. Rather than being scarred by 9/11, it allowed them to put their own life into context. As a Vietnamese person with a French first name, they started questioning things like: Why was it so easy for the US to go to war after 9/11, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq?
When it came time for college, Soleil says that they wanted to “get as far the fuck away from New York as” they could, which for them meant Iowa and Grinnell College. They chose the school to be closer to their grandparents, who still lived in nearby Illinois, and because Grinnell essentially billed itself as a place for folks to figure it out, so to speak.
By the time Soleil graduated college four years later, the sub-prime crash had happened and the subsequent recession had begun. They worked on a farm, which was hard but helped them better understand food systems. And then they moved to Minneapolis and began working in a restaurant, where we wrap up Part 1.
For Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Soleil was working in restaurants in Minneapolis, both front-of-house and back, and also starting writing about food around this time.
There was a new food publication in Minneapolis at the time called Heavy Table, and Soleil offered to intern for them. At first, it was a lot of looking around for events for the publication to cover. Eventually, there were opportunities to do some writing, and Soleil pounced. That led to other chances to write, and the proverbial ball was rolling. They were also on food stamps at the time, which doesn’t surprise me too much.
Rewinding a bit, Soleil talks about the food blog they had around 2007. It was mostly for recipes, but it was theirs and theirs alone. They looked up to the big food bloggers of the time, people who are still around and still writing about food.
From Minneapolis, Soleil moved to Portland. After they, tried New Orleans with the idea of going to grad school there, but fell back to restaurant work. And then they went to Puerto Vallarta to help their mom open a restaurant there. After Soleil’s sister went off to college, their mom had moved to Mexico City. She worked for a restaurant group for a while, then moved to PV to be with friends. Before Soleil arrived in Mexico to help their mom, their mom had opened a bar that later became a restaurant.
During their time in Puerto Vallerta, Soleil was still writing about food, and they did a podcast with friends, too. Racist Sandwich had started in Portland, and Soleil kept it going from Mexico. The show was a reaction to blatant white supremacy in the food and restaurant worlds, a problem that, though it’s eased some, is still with us today.
Juggling the many responsibilities that came with being in their mom’s restaurant in Mexico, along with podcasting when they could, it all eventually gave way to Soleil deciding to move back to the US to try being a full-time food writer. So they went back to Minneapolis and stayed for about six months. (Honey the dog chimed in here again, and you’ll have to use your imagination to guess what she had to say.)
It was 2018, and longtime SF Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer was retiring. Soleil picked up on that from Minnesota and it piqued their interest. The Washington Post was writing about the retirement, and asking folks out here in the Bay Area what they wanted the Chronicle do next. They published a slate of candidates to take over after Bauer, and it included Soleil. Shocked, they applied for the job. They got a phone call shortly after that, and here we are.
Soleil’s only prior visit to The Bay came in 2011, when they stayed at their friend’s apartment in the Tenderloin for a while. They visited Western Addition a lot, went to Zuni (such a good restaurant, though it’s mostly for special occasions for my family), and finally had good coffee at Phil’s.
I ask them whether San Francisco and the Bay Area stood out for them among the many, many places they’ve called home. They cite the history of the place as being quite the magnet. Then we get to the story of the approach Soleil wanted to bring to writing for the Chronicle, which, in their words, was to give more context to the art of food preparation.
After writing on staff for a bit, Soleil got one note from their bosses: They were writing about too many Asian restaurants. We both agree, though: DUH. There are hella Asian restaurants here, and it’s part of what a lot of us love about the place. Still, Soleil feels that the paper gave them enough freedom to write about what they wanted to write about.
I share the context of my own life and the world around me back in 2018 when I first learned about Soleil, letting them know that I, among many others I’m sure, welcomed them after such a long tenure of their predecessor. We start talking about doing their work during the pandemic, and they mention that they feel they were predisposed to talking about labor and other social aspects of the restaurant business.
Eventually, though, it was time to move on. One reason they cite for leaving the Chronicle is that they got tired of being so visible. A significant number of readers were hostile to Soleil, and it got to feel like a mismatch. The rightward political drift of the paper didn’t sit well either. They left in 2025.
That year, Soleil joined with some friends to launch COYOTE, a worker-owned media outlet. Those friends include: Nuala Bishari, Emma Silvers, Danny Lavery, Rahawa Haile, Estefany Gonzalez, and Cecilia Lei (visit the COYOTE Staff page to learn about a couple other folks who are involved). While still working at The Chronicle and in their off-time, they’d enroll in seminars on what cooperatives are and how to start and run them. They note that existing co-ops are very generous with their years and decades of knowledge, singling out Rainbow Grocery and Oakland’s Sustainable Economies Law Center.
COYOTE launched last September. Soleil says it’s going well, six months in.
Follow Soleil on IG @soleil_ho. Follow COYOTE Media Collective @coyotemediacollective.
We recorded this episode at Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley in March 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
