UMass Boston

Champion of Food Network’s Chopped. Laurence Louie G’11 shares his journey from UMass Boston grad to nationally recognized chef and acclaimed owner of North Quincy’s Rubato.

Thirty minutes. Three rounds. One shot at culinary glory.  That was the pressure facing chef Laurence Louie G’11 as he stepped into the Chopped kitchen in 2024. 

In the aptly named episode “A Little Taste of China,” Louie was tasked with transforming baskets of surprise ingredients—wonton wrappers, pak choi, ground chicken, and the sweet crunch of bingtang hulu—into something unforgettable. Working quickly, he coaxed creativity, elegance, and flavor from every dish, all under the watchful eyes of a panel of celebrated chefs.

 As the rounds heated up, so did the competition. Louie’s butter-poached salmon with fried milk breadcrumb and bitter melon pilaf earned praise from the judges in the entrée round. For dessert, he crafted a complex jackfruit tart with milk tea crème pâtissière and a chow mein cookie crumble. Outlasting competitors Katie Chin, Justine Ma, and David Wang, Louie emerged victorious, bringing home $10,000 and national bragging rights to his Quincy-based restaurant, Rubato. 

 For regulars at Rubato, Louie’s Chopped win was thrilling but not at all surprising. Since opening its doors in August 2022, the café has become a magnet for food lovers from all over Greater Boston, thanks in part to its expansive menu of Hong Kong and Cantonese comfort food. Housed in the former Contempo Bakery—run by Louie’s mother for more than two decades—Rubato draws a daily crowd for its buttery bolo bao sandwiches, pork-stuffed buns, and Hong Kong–style French toast. The café—and Louie—has scooped up accolades along the way, landing on Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list and earning a spot among Plate magazine’s Chefs to Watch. In 2024, Louie was named a semifinalist for the prestigious James Beard Award—an honor often described as the culinary world’s equivalent of the Academy Awards—for Best Chef: Northeast. Most recently, he was named a contestant for the upcoming season of Top Chef, set to premiere on March 9.

So, how did Louie go from being a UMass Boston graduate in American Studies to a James Beard Award–nominated chef? It wasn’t always a clear path, but it somehow deposited Louie exactly where he needed to be.

His career, during and after his time at UMass Boston, began in the world of grassroots organizing. Louie worked for a nonprofit that served the Chinese community in Boston, which helped him connect what he was learning in the classroom to practical issues in the city. He continued this work after graduation, and although he found it fulfilling, started to wonder if he wanted to stay in the field long-term.

“I didn’t have the answer to those questions,” Louie said, so he took a year off to travel to China and think about his future. “Food was always in the peripherals, so the year off allowed me to do some internal reflection.” He studied Mandarin, played a lot of basketball, and apprenticed with a local cook who taught him to how to make hand-pulled noodles.

When he arrived back in the United States, he decided to try to pursue a career in food. It would build on his family’s longstanding connection to cooking: His mother owned a Chinese bakery in Quincy for two decades, and food was central to every gathering Louie’s family hosted growing up.

Louie was 27 years old and jumped in feet-first, sending emails and job applications to any restaurant in Boston that had more than a four-star rating on Yelp. He explained to each potential employer that, while he lacked professional culinary training, he was willing to work hard to learn.

He was lucky enough to land a job at Oleana in Cambridge, at first completely unaware that its executive chef, Ana Sortun, was a James Beard Award winner. He was also lucky that Oleana’s kitchen proved to be a uniquely supportive and nourishing environment for a young chef. “It was very welcoming and allowed me to grow and really get introduced to a kitchen,” he said. 

Louie took this foundation with him to London, where he spent years working his way to a head chef position in London’s cutthroat restaurant scene. He was poised to help lead the expansion of a restaurant group there, when COVID-19 struck and shifted his path homeward to Boston.

The pandemic decimated the London restaurant world, prompting Louie and his wife to reconsider their life in the city. Around the same time, Louie’s elderly mother called to ask if Louie would come home and take over the family bakery. 

“Originally I said, ‘No,’ because the training and the experience I had were more in upscale, sit-down restaurants,” Louie said. “I was very comfortable with an eight-course tasting menu. … It’s kind of like, ‘I’m a real chef, Mom.’” 

But setting his ego aside, Louie began to think the opportunity made perfect sense for him: He was maturing as a chef and had the chance to reinvent the bakery as something new, while continuing to build his family’s legacy in the Chinese community of Quincy.

In many ways, Louie was positioned ideally to open a restaurant like Rubato. He grew up in an immigrant family that spoke Chinese, had lived in China for a year, had spent his early career organizing in the local Chinese community, and had even earned a master’s degree in American studies. 

“It felt, viscerally, like the right moment,” he said.

Rubato opened in the old bakery space about three years ago now and, despite its format as a small-scale, counter-service restaurant, has made a name for itself as an innovative culinary outpost in Boston.

“I’m not a preservationist; my goal is not to be a food historian,” Louie said. Instead, he looks at food through the nuanced lens he found in the American Studies program: one that acknowledges the history and influence of Chinese Americans, while also making room for its present.

In this way, the restaurant builds on his family’s legacy of working in restaurants—often out of economic necessity, not necessarily passion—but adds his unique culinary perspective.

“I’m the first generation, at least in my family, that has the privilege to say, ‘Yes, I love food because of that, and I’m willing to take that to a whole other level,’” Louie said, calling the experience “a full circle moment.” “I’m able to put it back into the world in this kind of nuanced way that speaks directly to my experience as a Chinese American.”

And in front of millions on Chopped, he did exactly that.