A long road

Penelope Wong was prepared for an angry mob. It was Yuan Wonton’s first day of service, and her food truck was parked outside Seedstock Brewery on a hot September afternoon in 2019. Wong was hurrying to prep the kitchen, while her husband, Rob Jenks, worked on a vacuum leak on the truck’s carburetor, and when she looked out the window, a line of 50 people was already waiting.

“Rob had to go and tell everyone before we even opened our doors that we might not have enough food to feed everybody, but to please be patient with us,” Wong said.

Within 20 minutes, she did run out — even as dozens more people were lining up. Wong hid behind the truck, a 40-year-old Frito Lay delivery vehicle that her cousin helped her convert for close to nothing, while Jenks told the crowd that they were done for the day.

“I was so scared they were all going to yell at us, but instead it was amazing because they all applauded and were so happy for us, which was such a different dynamic than what I was used to,” Wong said, talking about her previous experience in a kitchen.

“And from that point on, people started posting and re-sharing our food … and we just blew up, which really shows the power of social media right there,” she added.

Wong, a Denver native, launched Yuan Wonton with Jenks and her sous chef Ngoc Nguyen in 2019 after spending 20 years at Glenmoor Country Club. And it’s received quite a ravenous response. Pre-orders can sell out within five minutes and lines for walk-up orders, when the truck pulls up to breweries and pop-up events around town, have been as long as two hours.

But beyond that, Wong, who earned a James Beard semi-finalist nomination in January, has become a keystone in a growing Asian American Pacific Islander food scene around Denver, where chefs, women in particular, are using their voices to educate people about their cultures and to grow their visibility. That’s especially important right now, Wong said, as violence and discrimination against

Asian Americans in the U.S. has gained attention.

It’s something that is being highlighted this week during Denver’s first ever Mile High Asian Food Week, which runs Feb. 2226. Wong was one of the first to sign up.

“The amount of overwhelming support that the AAPI community has seen from Denver came as a shock to me and was something I never realized existed here,” Wong said, adding that she has seen a huge interest from her customers to learn about where the food comes from and why it’s important to her culture.

“I personally never thought that mattered to anyone because even as a kid I would get made fun of for some of the stuff I would bring for lunch, so it’s refreshing to see.”

Wong once dreamed of becoming a criminal psychologist. She graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a psychology degree, but when she became a single mom at 21 years old, she instead turned to what she’s always known: restaurants.

Her parents, both natives of Thailand, owned Chinatown Restaurant in north suburban Denver for more than 25 years, where she grew up shadowing them and her Chinese grandparents in the kitchen, learning how to make dumplings and wontons.

“The first knife I ever used was a Chinese cleaver when I was 12,” she said.

Without formal training, though, her first job outside of the family business was as a banquet server, at age 22, at Glenmoor Country

Club in Cherry Hills Village in 1998.

“I had no idea what a club sandwich was when I first started there,” she said. But over the next 20 years, she managed to work her way into the kitchen and then up the ladder, becoming Glenmoor’s first female and youngest executive chef.

She wasn’t afraid to be bold. On her very first day as executive chef, she fired the first cook who ever harassed her, and then she introduced wontons and dumplings as specials on Glenmoor’s dinner menu, hoping to teach club members about her family’s cuisine. “I got odd looks from some of the country club members, but we were lucky because we had a much younger membership than others clubs, so most were open to trying the specials,” Wong said.

She was also raising a family. Wong met Jenks, a sales rep for Southern Wine & Spirits, while she was at the club; they had worked together on wine pairing dinners. After getting married in 2011, they had a daughter Stella — and Wong began to think about making a change.

She didn’t want her daughter, now 11, to miss out on the things her son, now 25, had to while she was making ends meet, so she left Glenmoor in 2018, and Jenks left his job. They both wanted to stay in the food and beverage industry but knew starting a restaurant wouldn’t provide that quality of life or the worklife balance they were looking for. Wong and Jenks needed something else.