American Chinese food founder Jiang Sunyun dies at the age of 100
Jiang Sun Yun ( Cecilia Chiang ) on Wednesday in San Francisco, died at home, at the age of 100 years old. In the 1960s, she founded the Fu Lu Shou Restaurant ( Mandarin ) in San Francisco to introduce a rich variety of authentic Chinese food to American diners.
Half a century ago, she brought authentic Chinese food to the United States
Before Jiang Sunyun came to the United States from China, she was a rich girl who had walked nearly 700 miles to hide from the Japanese during World War II. Once she arrived in San Francisco, she—to a large extent by accident and almost by herself—developed Chinese food from the era of chopped noodles and fried noodles to a more refined era. She used her to stay in Beijing from the Ming Dynasty since she was a child. The dishes eaten in the palace’s remodeled home attract diners.
Fu Lu Shou Restaurant opened in 1962. At that time, it had 65 seats. It was located on Polk Street in the Russian Hill District. Later, it moved to Glodelli Square near Fisherman’s Wharf . It served features unheard of at the time. Dishes, such as pot stickers, Chongqing-style spicy beef jerky, Sichuan spicy eggplant, Mushu pork, rice noodle soup, and candied banana.
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This is the typical Fu Lu Shou style cooking, which is a general term for the dining style of the affluent class in Beijing. Their home chefs will make local dishes, as well as local specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Guangdong.
In a feature feature of Jiang Sunyun in 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle stated that her restaurant “defined high-end Chinese food, introduced to customers Sichuan dishes such as Kung Pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and also used lettuce pigeon pine, camphor The tea duck, as well as the jiaohua chicken filled with mushrooms, horseshoe and ham, and baked in the soil, redefine the cooking method.”
In 1982, diners of Fu Lu Shou Restaurant talked with Jiang Sunyun. Her restaurant is considered the “model of high-end Chinese food” in the United States. In 1982, diners of Fu Lu Shou Restaurant talked with Jiang Sunyun. Her restaurant is considered the “model of high-end Chinese food” in the United States.
This restaurant has become a destination for celebrities in the culinary world, including James Beard, Marion Cunningham and Alice Waters. They said that Jiang Sunyun was right The contribution of Chinese food is like the contribution of Julia Child to French cooking.
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The gourmet magazine ” Saveur ” also expressed a similar view in 2000, saying that Fu Lu Shou “successfully brought local Chinese cooking to the United States.”
Gastronomy scholar Paul Freedman (Paul Freedman) included Fu Lu Shou in his historical research work “Ten Restaurants that Changed America (2016 Edition)”.
Like Child (referring to Julia Child, she is a gourmet, writer, and TV host-editor’s note), Jiang Sunyun is not a chef, nor does she look like a restaurant owner. She was born in 1920-the exact date is unknown-near Shanghai, named Sun Yun, the seventh daughter of a family of nine daughters and three children. Her father Sun Longguang, a railway engineer who was educated in France, pursued a life of reading and gardening after retiring at the age of 50. Her mother Sun Shueh Yun Hui (Sun Shueh Yun Hui) came from a wealthy family who opened a textile mill and a flour mill. After her parents passed away, teenage Sun Yun began to manage corporate finances
The Ming Dynasty palace where she grew up occupies an entire block of Beijing, and they moved here in the mid-1920s. Children are not allowed to enter the kitchen, but she and her mother pay attention when they go to the vegetable market and listen carefully to what she says to the chefs.
After the Japanese occupied Beijing in 1939, the fate of the family became precarious. In early 1943, Sun Yun, who was called Cecilia by the teachers of the Roman Catholic Fu Jen Catholic University, left Beijing and went to relatives in Chongqing .
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She spent most of her long journey on foot. She survived on a few gold dollars sewn into her clothes. After the Japanese soldiers stole her suitcase, this was her only property.
In Chongqing, she found a part-time job teaching Mandarin in the embassies of the United States and the Soviet Union. She also met Jiang Liang, a professor of economics at Fu Jen Catholic University, and married him. Jiang Liang was an executive of a tobacco company at the time.
After the war, the couple moved to Shanghai. In 1949, when the Communist army was about to take over China, the Kuomintang embassy in Tokyo offered Jiang Liang a diplomatic post.
After living in Tokyo for two years, Jiang Sun Yun and a group of friends at a local restaurant opened a Forbidden City ( Forbidden City ). The restaurant quickly became a success, attracting overseas Chinese and Japanese diners.
Jiang Sunyun in 2014. Fu Lu Shou restaurant encountered a lot of difficulties in its initial operation. Due to lack of manpower, she had to scrub the kitchen floor by herself. Jiang Sunyun in 2014. Fu Lu Shou restaurant encountered a lot of difficulties in its initial operation. Due to lack of manpower, she had to scrub the kitchen floor by herself.
In 1960, Jiang Sunyun took a boat to San Francisco to help her husband’s sister who had just passed away. There, she met two Chinese acquaintances from Tokyo who had recently immigrated to the United States and wanted to open a restaurant. Jiang Sunyun agreed to give $10,000 as a deposit for a shop they found on Polk Street, a long way from Chinatown.
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After the two women withdrew from the partnership, Jiang Sunyun realized in a panic that the deposit was not refundable. She took a deep breath and decided to open the restaurant by herself instead of telling her husband that she had run out of money.
“I started to think, if I can create a restaurant with Western-style service and atmosphere, as well as the dishes I am most familiar with-the cuisine of northern China, maybe my small restaurant will succeed,” she wrote in her two cooking memoirs. The second ” The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco ” (” The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco “, published in 2007, co-authored with Lisa Weiss) Wrote in. Her first book was “The Mandarin Way” (“The Mandarin Way”, published in 1974, co-authored with Allan Carr).
The second of Jiang Sunyun’s two culinary memoirs, published in 2007. The second of Jiang Sunyun’s two culinary memoirs, published in 2007.
Through newspaper advertisements, Jiang Sunyun found two talented chefs, a couple from Shandong, and the restaurant soon opened. The early days were difficult. Local suppliers all speak Cantonese, and they refuse to deliver goods to Fu Lu Shou or provide loans. A menu of up to 200 dishes is also difficult to handle. Due to lack of manpower, Jiang Sunyun had to scrub the kitchen floor by herself.
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But gradually, Chinese diners and some Americans began to come here regularly for hot and sour soup and fried pot stickers. One evening, Herb Caen, a popular columnist for The Chronicle, came to this restaurant for dinner. In a subsequent column, he called this “small restaurant” “some of the most delicious Chinese food on the east coast of the Pacific.”
Overnight, the restaurant was full. There was a long line outside the door. Fu Lu Shou is on fire. In 1968, Jiang Sunyun moved the restaurant to a larger store in Glover Plaza, which can accommodate 300 diners and also offers cooking courses.
In 1975, she opened the second Fu Lu Shou restaurant in Beverly Hills, California. In 1989, she sold the store to her son Philip. Later, he helped found the PF Chang restaurant chain. The daughter of Jiang Yifan and Jiang Sunyun, May Ongbhaibulya (May Ongbhaibulya) is still alive; Jiang Sunyun has three granddaughters; and three great-grandchildren.
In 1991, Jiang Sunyun sold the first Fu Lu Shou restaurant. It went out of business in 2006.
Jiang Sunyun continued to serve as a restaurant consultant in her 90s. Director Wang Ying filmed a documentary about her, ” Soul of a Banquet ” ( Soul of a Banquet ), which was released in 2014. In 2016, San Diego PBS TV station KPBS aired a six-episode series, ” The Kitchen Wisdom of Cecilia Chiang ” ( The Kitchen Wisdom of Cecilia Chiang ).
“I think I changed ordinary people’s perception of Chinese food,” Jiang Sunyun told the Chronicle in 2007. “None of them knew that China is such a big country.”