Kiki Aranita is a chef, food writer, fiber artist, sauce entrepreneur, and recipe developer. 

Her career paths exist simultaneously and are tied together by the same themes: nostalgia and care for the ocean. Whether cooking or writing, her primary goal has been to honestly represent the flavors of Hawai’i and what her ancestors endured working on Kauai’s sugarcane plantations. She’s an advocate for responsibly raised and caught seafood and regenerative farming practices, especially in her home state of Hawai’i. As a chef, she specializes in Hawai’i’s fresh fish dishes and low waste cooking, and as a fiber artist, she works primarily with scrap yarn, in a small effort to keep micro-plastics out of our waterways.

Kiki spent seven years as co-chef and owner of Poi Dog, a restaurant, food truck, and catering company that served Hawaii’s local food. “Poi dog” is an affectionate Hawaiian Pidgin term meaning “mixed breed” or “mutt.” She closed Poi Dog’s Center City Philadelphia location in July 2020 but has kept the brand alive in large-scale pop ups and retail sauces. Her sauces are sold at all Whole Foods stores in the Mid-Atlantic, specialty grocers across the nation, and they are used in the dining halls at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, along with numerous restaurants. 

For years, her goals also involved celebrating the underrepresented cuisines of multicultural origins and collaborating with other chefs. She has continued to cook though she has transitioned into writing as a career, through chef residencies at Jose Garces’ Volver, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bok Bar and more. She has collaborated with chefs globally, from Canada to Bahrain to Turkey.

She has written food features, personal and travel narratives, and investigations into the sustainability of food systems, for instance, a series on the history of sugarcane for The Guardian. She has developed recipes and recipe-driven videos for many publications, brands, and platforms.

She was a senior editor at NY Magazine’s The Strategist, covering everything that has to do with kitchen and dining. She joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as a food writer in October 2024.

Kiki is also a columnist for San Pellegrino’s Fine Dining Lovers (she wrote the monthly column The Next Course, and her new column, relaunched in February 2025 is called Trend to Table) and a frequent contributor to Food & Wine Magazine, for which she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Media Award in 2022. She is also the 2023 winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Prize (Les Dames d’Escoffier Intl) for food writing and a 2024 IACP winner for contributing to EatingWell’s Heritage Cooking column.

Raised in Honolulu and Hong Kong, she holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Comparative Literature with Italian, and a graduate degree in Classics. She spent her graduate career teaching extensively at the graduate and undergraduate levels in the New York City area and in Taiwan. Even after switching careers from academia to cooking, and then from cooking to writing, she has continued to hold various teaching positions at Drexel University, Penn Museum, and Boston University, conducting classes that range from technical culinary skills to Hawaiian food history.