Best-selling ghostwriter Elisa Ung credits her lifelong Love of musicals with gifting her the tools she relies on in her collaborative work. “They’ve taught me to listen for rhythms and cadences in authors’ voices,” she writes. “They help me understand how to respect readers by telling the most powerful story in the least amount of time.”
Elisa’s path to this type of storytelling might seem familiar to As Told To listeners, but she has walked it with a song in her heart… and an appetite for the stories we share at the Family table, and in our family kitchens. A former news reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered the city’s Oxycontin epidemic in the early 2000s and reported from New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, she traded her nose for hard news for a decade-long gig as a restaurant critic for the Bergen Record.
From there, she discovered a passion for writing about food—and about people who live their lives surrounded by food.
She is the co-author of the memoir-driven cookbook Mango and Peppercorns, with noted American chef Tung Nguyen, winner of the 2022 IACP award for Literary or Historical Food Writing; and, Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond, a 2025 New York Times “Best Cookbook of 2025” selection, with Beejhy Barhany, chef and owner of Harlem’s celebrated Tsion Café.
Her 2024 collaboration with food and wellness blogger Monique Volz, The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook, was a New York Times best-seller.
Join us for a delicious reflection on what it takes for a journalist to empower her subjects, from diverse backgrounds, to sit down to table and share their own stories.
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