Susan Feniger

Chef-owner, Street; co-owner, Border Grill
Los Angeles, California

Flames erupt out of chef Susan Feniger’s scalding-hot pan, a pan

filled with Manila clams, and Feniger doesn’t flinch. “One thing

people don’t do at home is get their pans hot enough,” she informs

me.

Flames suit Feniger, a chef who’s positively fearless in the

kitchen. While making one of her favorite dishes, kaya toast (a

Singaporean street sandwich of homemade coconut curd and salted

butter that’s served with a fried egg drenched in black soy sauce),

she steeps pandan leaves—a grassy-smelling green available in

Asian markets—in a pot of boiling coconut milk. The fearless part

comes when, after she whisks the hot milk into a bowl of eggs and

yolks, she wrings out the boiling-hot pandan leaves with her

hands. “Make sure to squeeze it out like this,” she says, no sign of

pain on her face. “You’ll get all this amazing flavor.”

The fearlessness goes hand in hand with the energy Feniger

brings to everything she does. The woman who, along with her

business partner, Mary Sue Milliken, changed the Los Angeles

culinary landscape with City Café and Border Grill in the 1980s

and ’90s, and who helped build the burgeoning Food Network

with the show Too Hot Tamales, is a born adventurer.