Chef Anna Ameyama’s dream of running her own food truck comes true until a run-in with Avenger-level destruction. But she soon becomes personal chef to one of the team’s most famous members and continues her culinary career.
T.E.S.T. Kitchen
Cooking calms Japanese-American Anna Ameyama’s nerves and keeps her focused, so she makes a career out of it. Studying the basics of cooking at The Culinary Institute, Anna becomes a chef but receives her real education in kitchens across the world. She cooks for well-known restaurants like Jean-Georges in New York, Mume in Taiwan, Den in Tokyo, L’imbuto in Italy, and Quintonil in Mexico City. When she decides to go solo, she opens a food truck, Namida, in New York City and does well for about six months until Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, smashes into her truck, destroying it. He flies off to deal with Fin Fang Foom without so much as an acknowledgement of the damage to her business. Though furious with him, she does what she can, gathering tools that survived the destruction and continues to cook for her customers, offering her food for free. When Tony returns, he apologizes and after tasting her Tonkatsu Torta, he offers her a job as his personal chef. She refuses at first but then takes him up on it.
Culinary Master
Anna is a highly-skilled chef with a breadth of experience cooking in kitchens all over the world.
In a Pickle
So far Anna does not have any enemies to speak of, but while working for a high-profile Avenger, it’s possible that some foes might eventually come with the territory.
Big Enchiladas
Anna works closely with her Mechanical Interactive Kitchen Assistant (M.I.K.A.), a robot designed by her boss, Iron Man, to help her prep and cook food. During her culinary adventures as Mr. Stark’s chef, she meets and helps several Avengers at their birthday and charity events.
Edwin Jarvis, the Avengers’ former butler, is someone Anna turns to for advice and refers to him as “Uncle Jarvis”.
A Chef’s Recipe Box
After arriving to Stark Industries to start her new job as Tony Stark’s personal chef, she entered Stark’s T.E.S.T. Kitchen, which amounted to an industrial kitchen equipped with her own Mechanical Interactive Kitchen Assistant (M.I.K.A.), who startled her at first. Given a refrigerator full of the finest foods, and directions from Tony himself to make dinner to impress a guest with notoriously high standards, Anna saw it as a trap and decided to stick to the basics. She finished cooking up a test meal with a linguine pasta that she made from scratch and a clam broth enhanced with umami, and Tony arrived early with his guest, mutant telepath Emma Frost. She was so dazzled with the meal that she took the recipe from Anna’s mind.
Her next task from Tony was to make a birthday dinner for Janet Van Dyne, AKA The Wasp, and the rest of the Avengers at a barn in Connecticut. The theme was a BBQ and she used a secret sauce that she dared Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to guess the secret ingredient. It turned out it was made from a recipe courtesy of their old butler, Edwin Jarvis, someone she refers to as uncle in her private life, though she kept that information from Tony.
For Tony’s annual Halloween F.E.A.S.T. Feast, a charity event to feed those less fortunate, Anna arrived to the Stark Industries kitchen to find M.I.K.A. hard at work on prepping Tony’s requested pumpkin spiced waffles. But Anna wasn’t about that overused flavor profile and instead made an interactive butternut squash soup and it was a hit. While serving up the soup, she met Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, for the first time though was not aware of his alter-ego.
The day after Thanksgiving, Anna was exhausted from prepping for Tony’s numerous dinners, and her cat, Yoyo, woke her up by slapping her in the face. She awoke to the smell of Wakandan coffee made by her roommate and pastry chef M’Betu, and made him Turkey Dumplings using leftovers. She also fed their dog as well, and the pair planned to spend the day together.
After helping an old friend amp up his new menu at Nova Napoli, Tony contacted Anna on her day off and asked her to help a friend. She agreed and was instantly whisked away by the Rainbow Bridge to the kitchen of the Palace of Asgard. It turned out that the friend in need was Thor Odinson, AKA Thor, and he needed her to help the palace chefs recreate his favorite Midgard dish, succotash, for his mother’s birthday banquet. As she led the preparation and worked with her new friend Alida, she found that Asgard’s tomatoes were magical and decided to take some seeds home with her. Her succotash was a resounding success.
Anna next invited her friend Chef Sono to get a handle on Japanese “Osechi” which are beautiful boxes of foods traditionally eaten during the new year in Japan, so she could make a couple for the next holiday celebration in honor of her own culture. Stark then took her down to a sublevel in Stark Industries where he presented her with a gift, her fully restored Namida Food Truck along with an unlimited account for groceries and ingredients for the truck. She opened the truck with M’Betu’s help outside the Children’s Hospital. Though she faced a difficult choice: go back to running the truck or continue as Stark’s personal chef. She thought it was time to reach out to her Uncle Jarvis for advice.
