For at least a decade, Eddie Huang thought of himself as a writer. But when he moved to Los Angeles and started writing every day, he realised the arrangement didn’t suit him at all. “My life actually does not work when it revolves around the writing,” he says. “And the writing is actually best when it is secondary to life-living.”

Not that “life-living” is itself straightforward. Huang trained as a lawyer before walking away from a corporate firm to open his own restaurant. Food led him to Viceland, where he hosted and produced his own series, Huang’s World. A bestselling memoir, Fresh Off The Boat, followed, and this summer he published his first novel, Come Undone.

What ties his life together, though, is cooking. But being a chef is a strange place to have landed. He cooked out of necessity long before he cooked by choice, with his parents not encouraging the kitchen as a career. His father taught him how to cook fried rice and his mum taught him everything else. “As a son of immigrants, your parents are always like, ‘don’t be a cook, don’t be a chef’,” he says. “It’s a very hard, difficult physical labour – at 44, I feel it on my body.”

If you walk into Baohaus in New York – his Taiwanese-inspired restaurant that he’s bringing to LA’s Chez Jay for one night only, in partnership with MR PORTER and Stone Island – you instantly feel a certain warmth that he’s worked hard to achieve, but that also comes naturally. The chef has two personal highlights. “It’s a tie between the smoked duck bao and the mapo tofu,” he says. “We spend the most time and effort on those two. They’re quite elaborate processes for a $20 dish. The chillies in our mapo tofu, we ferment ourselves. The duck rests up to 36 hours, then we cure it and slice each piece.”

There’s a direct line between running a restaurant, he says, and the other hats he’s worn. Early on, he just assumed everything was about his talent, vision and creativity. But he now finds it’s all about the craft of getting different elements – or members of staff, even – to move together. “I need to get three other people in that kitchen to dance with three other people that come in the morning and do prep,” he says. “It’s that ballet between everyone in the kitchen and then the front of house that delivers a great meal to you.”

It’s a philosophy that also extends to the people around him. Huang’s closest relationships have always started with something people love, rather than something they want. “I’ve formed community around curiosity and interest in a craft,” he says. That sense of integrity has shaped the way he handles criticism – two bad reviews from The New York Times, while the restaurant is still booked out, is proof. “Whether it’s a book or a dish, by the time I put it out, I already love it. It’s part of me. And whether people like it or not, it doesn’t matter to me.”

All of which is to say that the food itself isn’t really the main point. Rather, it’s staying true to himself. Huang learnt hospitality in other people’s homes. One dinner in particular has stayed with him: breaking the Ramadan fast with a family in rural eastern Turkey, seated on newspapers spread across the floor, in front of 13 or 14 dishes. “It was probably the most vibrant, beautiful meal I’ve ever seen in a home,” he says. “The way they welcomed a stranger and made sure I was comfortable, was very cool to me.”

A good restaurant, for him, is successfully reproducing that feeling. “I think restaurants get lost when they’re trying to create this amorphous, artificial idea of a meal,” he says. “I actually think restaurants at their best are reflections of the home.”

When it comes to his way of dressing, nothing is forced, either. He inherited his sense of style from his father and his father’s friends – “street dudes from Taipei” – in gold rings, Cartier frames and the occasional YSL suit or Versace trousers, filtered through his own childhood appreciation for hip-hop, basketball and wrestling. The non-negotiable piece is a gold Buddha pendant on a Cuban link chain that he always wears. He wears Teatora pants almost every day, too.

Then, there’s his extensive collection of Stone Island pieces. “Men develop friendships over collecting it,” Huang says. “A guy named Joey got in an elevator with me at the Bowery Hotel and a couple of weeks after we met, he mailed me the red Tela Stella jacket he’d been wearing. We’re still friends.”

Unlike so much of the streetwear he grew up wearing, the brand has stuck because of the way it makes him feel – and look, obviously. “The kid in me doesn’t have to die. High-school me would have loved to wear Stone Island. Adult me also looks great in it.”