Kiki Aranita is a chef, food writer, fiber artist, sauce entrepreneur, and recipe developer. Until recently, she was a senior editor at NY Magazine’s The Strategist, covering everything that has to do with kitchen and dining. She has just joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as a food writer in October 2024.

Her career paths exist simultaneously and are tied together by the same themes: nostalgia (particularly when it comes to the food of Kiki’s hometowns of Honolulu and Hong Kong) and care for the ocean. 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 uses primarily 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. She closed its Center City Philadelphia location in July 2020 but has kept the brand alive in large-scale pop ups and retail sauces. 

For years, her goals involved celebrating the underrepresented cuisines of multicultural origins and collaborating with other chefs. She has continued to cook, 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.

Kiki has been a columnist for San Pellegrino’s Fine Dining Lovers (she wrote the monthly column The Next Course) 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.

She writes food features, personal and travel narratives, and investigations into the sustainability of food systems. She has developed recipes and recipe-driven videos for many publications, brands, and platforms. Some of these brands include Vulcan Equipment, Savencia Cheese, the Mushroom Council, Vitamix Commercial, Sakara Life and the Norwegian Seafood Council.