In the early 1920s, Armenian George Mardikian fled persecution in Turkey and migrated to California, where he would open a restaurant and later become food consultant to the Quartermaster General of the US Army. Little more than twenty years later, and for entirely different reasons, Turkish fighter pilot Irfan Orga precipitously left his homeland for London in order to escape charges brought against him by the Turkish military court for having lived with a foreigner. Both men subsequently become recognized voices of Armenian and Turkish cuisines in the United States and the United Kingdom. Both authored cookbooks that went on to sell in multiple editions, in addition to writing well-reviewed autobiographies. Cookbooks and autobiographical food writing offer striking insights into the choices that authors make in representing their identities. While the vast majority of English-language food writing by Middle Eastern authors about their home cuisines are by women, Mardikian and Orga offer a fascinating example of the genre written by men. In this paper, I explore the ways that Mardikian and Orga depict their own masculine identities as diasporic Middle Eastern men writing for mainstream audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom. As individuals, they occupied a hybridized cultural space, having migrated west as young adults after spending their childhoods in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey respectively. Both men had spent significant time employed in the highly gendered context of the military, and we find in their writings a self-confident vision of cross-cultural masculine culinary identities. In unpacking their self-representation as food writers, and in Mardikian’s case as a restaurateur, I focus on depictions of their domestic lives with their families, their memories of family cooking from their childhoods, and their respective understandings of the social and professional roles of cook and chef. I argue that the abrupt dislocation involved in becoming diasporic pressed these men into a culturally fluid space where they needed to articulate new understandings of their own professionalized masculinity, and that food writing served both as a platform and process for that re-articulation.