Christine Ha

Executive Chef

Christine Ha is the blind cook who won "MasterChef" season 3 with Gordon Ramsay. Her cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen, was a New York Times best-seller. She has spoken about disability advocacy at the United Nations, served as a culinary envoy overseas for the American Embassy, and was a co-host on the Canadian cooking show "Four Senses" and a judge on "MasterChef" Vietnam.

Christine holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Creative Writing Program at University of Houston, where she served as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast literary journal, and a Bachelor of Business Administration from The University of Texas at Austin.

In 2020, the James Beard Foundation named The Blind Goat a semi-finalist for Best New Restaurant in America when it was just a 400-square-foot station inside a food hall. That same year, Christine opened Xin Chào with co-chef Tony Nguyen, and they were named a finalist for the James Beard Award for Best Chef, Texas region, in 2022, and a semi-finalist for Outstanding Chef in America in 2023.

Christine attributes her love of Vietnamese food and cooking to her late parents, both Vietnamese refugees, especially her mom who never left any recipes behind nor taught her how to cook. Instead, Christine is entirely self-taught—as a sophomore in college, she decided she missed the dishes from her childhood, so she read cookbooks, experimented in the kitchen, and the love of creating dishes to delight friends and family grew from there. Cooking Vietnamese food is Christine's way of paying homage to her parents in the kitchen.