The restaurateur who brought authentic Chinese food to America

Cecilia Chiang 1920–2020

After Cecilia Chiang opened her landmark restaurant, the Mandarin, in San Francisco in 1961, customers would often walk in and ask, “Is this a Chinese restaurant?” The confusion was understandable. Unlike almost every other Chinese eatery in America at the time, the Mandarin didn’t serve chop suey or Americanized versions of Cantonese food and its walls weren’t decked with dragons, lanterns, and other cultural stereotyping. Instead, the restaurant gave American diners a taste of the richness and variety of the food that Chiang had grown up eating as a child of wealth in Beijing. The menu was full of then-exotic dishes—pot stickers, sizzling rice soup, smoked tea duck, moo shu pork—that are now ubiquitous at American Chinese restaurants. The Mandarin became a place of pilgrimage for chefs, tourists, dignitaries, and celebrities, and its owner was the consummate hostess, working the VIP room in custom-made gowns. “I think I changed what average people know about Chinese food,” she said in 2007. “They didn’t know China was such a big country.” Born Sun Yun, she was raised in a 52-room Ming-dynasty palace that “occupied an entire block in Beijing,” said The New York Times. Children were not allowed in the kitchen, but she would listen closely to the instructions her mother gave to the family’s two cooks. Her “privileged childhood was shattered in 1937” when Japanese forces occupied Beijing, said the San Francisco Chronicle. Meals were soon “reduced to rice husks and green peas,” so in 1943, she trekked nearly 1,000 miles with a sister to the free city of Chongqing, hiding from Japanese planes during the day and walking at night. She met her husband, businessman Chiang Liang, in Chongqing, but in 1949 the couple fled to Japan to escape the Communist Revolution.

In Tokyo, Chiang opened a successful restaurant that catered to Chinese expatriates and Japanese natives. “Around

1960, she became an accidental U.S. restaurant owner” after putting a $10,000 nonrefundable deposit down on a San Francisco store for two friends who wanted to open an eatery, said NBCNews.com. When the two friends suddenly backed out of the deal, Chiang decided to start the restaurant herself and introduce Americans to authentic Chinese cooking. Chiang sold the Mandarin in 1991 but remained involved in the food business: Her son, Philip, founded the chain P.F. Chang’s. “I’m just very lucky that I have a good nose, a good palate,” she said of her culinary achievements. “That’s something money cannot buy.”