Chef Tim Ma is back for seconds

At first glance, Chef Tim Ma's resume reads like that of a fine dining restaurateur. Over the past two decades, he's graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York, helped open roughly 15 restaurants and bars, and founded Tim Ma Hospitality. He's cooked at the White House, watched his family's restaurant heirlooms be inducted into the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and co-founded the nonprofit Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate

And then there's the master's degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Ma graduated from Hopkins in 2004. In 2008, he left his successful career at Raytheon to pursue his dream of opening a restaurant. Now, in 2025, he's back at JHU to bring his culinary expertise to the new Johns Hopkins Student Center. When it opens later this year, the Student Center will include three culinary concepts from Ma and his team: a fast-casual Chinese-American food stall, a coffee shop, and a full service restaurant, to be named Mo's Place in honor of generous support from Morris Offit, a member of the class of 1957 and former chair of the board of trustees. That top-floor spot will be the center's signature sit-down dining location.

"It's exciting to be able to go back and do something with the university, just not as an engineer," Ma said.

With the Student Center set to open later this year, Ma sat down with the Hub to discuss his unconventional career path and how it led him back to JHU.

You graduated from Hopkins with a master's in electrical engineering. What made you switch to the culinary arts?

My family has a long history in restaurants, specifically Chinese restaurants in America. My family's restaurant heirlooms were inducted into the Smithsonian American History Museum. Everybody's just always ended up in restaurants. My parents owned a restaurant. My uncle had the famous restaurant. My other uncle owned a restaurant. My aunt's written a cookbook. So food's always been the center of the family. They were all immigrants coming to America and doing what they knew so that they could support their kids. ... It's a tough industry, but I was the one that came back to it. They wanted all their children to be lawyers, doctors, engineers. I was the engineer. Everybody else is roughly a lawyer.

[Opening a restaurant] was always in my mind. And then I was in California, where my sister lives, and we were out to dinner at this really nice sushi restaurant. Just me, my brother-in-law, and my sister, and I was just like, "Oh, you know, I've been thinking about opening a restaurant." They're like, "Dude, just do it. Friends and family will support you alone for the first year. If you if you really want to do it, you should." That was probably four years before I actually took the leap, but that was the pivotal moment where I was pushed hard enough to go toward it.

It was quite ironic. I was being given an award by Raytheon for the work I was doing, and then I quit my job cold turkey. I sold everything I had, I applied to the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and I moved to New York City. Just one day packed everything up.

I worked for Momofuku at first. Within the first couple days of being in New York City, I sought out [David] Chang to work for him. That's how it started. It was really, really abrupt. And everybody around me was like, "Wow, this is kind of crazy."

What was the name of the first restaurant you opened?

The very first restaurant was called Maple Ave, which is still there to this day [in Vienna, Virginia]. I sold it. I sold it maybe a decade ago at this point. But yeah, my first restaurant, which was only nine tables in this little shack, was a lot of hard work. We built it. We put up the drywall ourselves. We built that restaurant with our bare hands. So it probably shows now in terms of it falling apart, but it is still there. I'm still very proud of that little restaurant that started off everything.

My first restaurant in D.C. was called Kyirisan, which was French-Chinese, and it was the first dip into exploring my Chinese heritage. Obviously, I'm a Chinese-American, so I was born in America. I didn't touch a lot of my Chinese background, mainly because I was born in Arkansas in the '70s and I had to assimilate into American culture very quickly. And so that's what I did, but I was never seen as an American and never seen as a Chinese. [I brought] the narrative to some of my restaurants after Curacao, exploring what it means to be Chinese in America these days. ... I'm very proud of finding both sides of the culture.

Over the past few years, you've taken a half-step away from fine dining into more casual fare. What pushed you in that direction?

I think it was this inertia that was happening pre-pandemic, right as we were rolling into 2019. Just a couple months before the shutdown, I was running food and beverage within a hotel called Eaton and doing some other things like Prather's on the Alley and Laoban Dumplings, which I still do.

The pressures of fine dining are really intense, right? I think most chefs will attest to that. As beautiful as it is, it is a very hard thing to stay on that. That's why I have so much respect for people that can maintain three Michelin stars for like 20-some years: the discipline. And maybe I just don't have that. But we were starting to explore more of the Chinese side of food in America. Even [my restaurant] American Son was leaning that way. Then when the pandemic hit, most people took a step back to see what was important to them, and culture became something very important to me.

That's kind of where the shift happened. The pandemic allowed us—me and my team—to do that. What's important is what you're putting forth for the culture and just doing something that people want rather than what the chef wants.

Does your background as an electrical engineer gives you any unique perspectives when it comes to running a restaurant?

Yes, for sure. I feel like a lot of engineers are overly logical by nature, and I think a lot of people in the restaurant industry lead with emotion sometimes, and so trying to find that balance between logic and emotion has been an interesting one. They're always fighting against each other. But the engineering background really gives me a different kind of mind to the approach here, and so I think that's really been an advantage.

How does it feel to return to Hopkins after all these years?

It's interesting. I did most of my stuff out at the Applied Physics Laboratory, so I actually never ventured into Homewood. I lived in Odenton near Fort Meade, so stepping onto Homewood's campus to explore it as a restaurateur was the first time I did because I never did as an engineer. I'm coming back as an alumni but not using my degree in any shape or way.

We're just really excited to come. This is our first foray into Maryland. I've lived in the DMV for 37 years at this point. I've always just been D and V. So this is fun to be able to get into Maryland and get into Baltimore and explore.

Your collaboration with JHU will include a sit-down restaurant, a fast casual food stall, and a quick service coffee kiosk. Are there any parts of these projects that you're particularly excited about?

The fast casual and the coffee kiosk are brands that are already established that we're currently running here in D.C. and Virginia [Lucky Danger and Any Day Now], so we're especially excited about this restaurant that we're going to run because it's not something like what we have. We run bars and restaurants. We actually run a bar and restaurant on Georgetown's campus down here in D.C., so we have some experience with it. But we're excited for that part of it because it's a new brand that we're exploring. It's always exciting to be able to run a full service restaurant in a unique environment.

Have you found the need to change any of your established menus to better appeal to the college student demographic?

Yeah, it's a different business. It's completely different, almost a different industry. ... We're always differentiating between what we do on campus and what we do just out normally. I come from a fine-dining background, and so it is interesting to have the challenge of approaching food from [the college] perspective and the fine-dining perspective, understanding that the client is completely different with a different set of intentions when they eat. We're trying to find that happy medium where we're putting out something that we're super proud of while trying to meet a price point that the college student can afford and wants to pay. It is always a constant back and forth. And so I think we found a good balance of that [at Georgetown]. It's taken a couple semesters. Hopefully we're taking that experience straight into Johns Hopkins right off the bat.

Do you have any advice for other Hopkins alums who are considering a change in career paths?

[Cooking] was one of those things where it was always a passion of mine. And I wasn't that young when I switched. I was like 30 years old. I had an entire career in engineering and doing quite well. ... I essentially threw my degrees away when I was 30 years old.

Follow your passion. Don't fight it until it's too late. I felt like even for me when I was at 30, it was already too late. I was like, I wish at times that I had started earlier so that I had a little bit more runway. But I always fought against the passion of what I wanted to do based on opposing dreams, right? Like my dream to open a restaurant or my parents' dream. They did all this hard work so that their kids wouldn't have to do the same work that they were doing.

I wish I did it a little bit earlier. And so my advice would be: If you're passionate about something, go do it now.