Cecilia Chiang, the mother of Chinese food in America and one of the most influential figures in Bay Area culinary history, died early Wednesday. She was 100 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her granddaughter, Siena Chiang, as well as by multiple friends who did not wish to give their names. Chiang died at home in San Francisco of natural causes, her granddaughter said.
Chiang made her name as the pioneering owner of the Mandarin, a bygone San Francisco restaurant that broke the mold in 1959 by bringing new levels of sophistication to Chinese cuisine in America. Though she didn’t cook herself, she was responsible for introducing Americans to now-ubiquitous Chinese dishes like potstickers, hot-and-sour soup and tea-smoked duck. She rubbed elbows with rock stars and royalty, while embracing not only the role of grande dame of San Francisco Chinese food, but of gracious mentor of the restaurant industry, even well into her 90s.
Her incredible life, from accidental restaurateur to culinary pioneer, goes beyond food, encapsulating 20th century Chinese-American diaspora, and the subsequent history of Chinese culture in San Francisco.
Photo Cecilia Chiang, former owner of the groundbreaking Mandarin restaurant in Ghirardelli Square in the late 1960’s. Photo of Cecilia at home during an interview.
on 10/9/07 in Belvedere.
photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle
Craig Lee / San Francisco Chronicle 2007Cecilia Chiang was born on Sept. 18, 1920. She grew up in Beijing, where she and her 12 siblings were raised in a 52-room palace.
Her Chinese name was Sun Yun; Sun was her family name, and Yun was her given name, meaning “flower of the rue.” She also was known as the seventh daughter, a moniker that would later become the title of one of her memoirs.
Chiang was raised in a household with servants, most notably two cooks — one from northern China and one from southern China. The children were never allowed in the kitchen, but for the rest of her life, Chiang would remember the food that she ate over her first 20 years.
Family meals typically included a whole fish and a meat dish of some sort. In her first memoir, “The Mandarin Way,” Chiang fondly remembered red-cooked pork — fresh pork slowly simmered for hours in soy sauce — as her favorite meat dish in wintertime. She recalled banquets full of smoked ducks carved by cooks in front of guests and served with hoisin sauce, “laboriously trimmed” scallions and a plate of pancake wrappers. Leftover dumplings were transformed into kuo-t’ieh — crescent-shaped dumplings cooked in a pan and now commonly dubbed potstickers.
“I never cooked, but I knew exactly what the food should taste like and look like. I have a very good palate and good memory,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 2013.
Chiang’s privileged childhood was shattered in 1937. Awakened by gunfire, she hid under the bed from what she would later learn was the beginning of the Japanese occupation of Beijing. Foreign soldiers streamed into the Chinese capital. Over the next several years, life would become increasingly difficult for her family. Food was reduced to rice husks and green peas; bargains had to be struck for once-ubiquitous commodities like rice, pork and sugar.
In the predawn hours of January 1943, Chiang, who was barely into her 20s, fled the occupation with one of her sisters, setting off on a 1,000-mile trek to relatives in the free province of Chongqing. They left their ransacked mansion with several suitcases and pieces of gold sewn into their underclothes. Japanese soldiers stole their luggage before long, and the girls survived the six-month walk on the gold coins and, as Chiang would later put it, the kindness of strangers.
She would eventually meet her husband, businessman Chiang Liang, and have two children, May and Philip. Like another American culinary pioneer, Julia Child, Chiang was a spy during the war, working for America’s Office of Strategic Services.
The family escaped China in the midst of 1949’s Communist Revolution, hopping on the last flight from Shanghai to Japan. But they could procure only three tickets, so Philip, an infant at the time, had to be left behind. He would remain in China with Chiang’s sister for the next 18 months before joining his family in Japan.
During the 1950s, Chiang owned a restaurant in Japan, but a fateful 1959 trip to San Francisco would change the course of her life — and American dining.
Chiang traveled to California to visit a newly widowed sister. Her sister, mired in grief, lived near San Francisco’s Chinatown. Neither sister knew how to cook, given their privileged upbringing, so they found themselves dining out.
She was shocked by the restaurants here. Clad in fluorescent lights, linoleum floors and plastic tables, they were inelegant and worse, monotonous. She would famously recall how all the menus seemed the same, led by Americanized versions of Cantonese food, or even dishes that did not exist in China: chop suey, sweet-and-sour pork, egg foo young. This was not the complex, graceful regional cuisine of China that she knew so well.
It was while pondering this conflict that Chiang’s accidental career as an American restaurateur began.
One day, on her way to lunch Chinatown, she ran into two Chinese women she knew from Tokyo who asked for her help. The next day, the trio met at the Lotus Garden, one of two dim sum houses in San Francisco at the time. The two women wanted to open a restaurant on Polk Street, and they needed Chiang, who spoke some English and had experience as a businesswomen, to negotiate the lease.
She acquiesced — but there was a catch. Someone had to put up a $10,000 deposit. Chiang wrote a check on the spot. Decades later, in her second memoir, “The Seventh Daughter,” she would explain this act of generosity as “the Chinese way — if you can, you do.”
Her two would-be partners, however, backed out of the restaurant soon thereafter. The deposit was non-refundable, so suddenly Chiang found herself a restaurateur. Proud and stubborn, she was determined to open a restaurant and bring real Chinese food to America.
She placed an ad for a chef and hired a couple who hailed from Shandong province. She painted the door bright red for good luck, and hung brass letters that spelled the restaurant’s name: the Mandarin.
Opened in 1959, the Mandarin changed the course of Chinese restaurants in America. It was a sophisticated place, with carpeted floors and a formality on par with French and Continental genres — a far cry from the city’s ubiquitous Chinese takeout joints.
The food was not the popular Chinese-American fare of the time either. Not knowing what people might like, Chiang put over 300 items on the menu, including many then-unfamiliar dishes from the Sichuan and Hunan provinces.
Many of those dishes would become the canon for Chinese food in the United States: potstickers, hot-and-sour soup, sizzling rice soup, beggar’s chicken and the bestseller, smoked tea duck.
Yet the Mandarin was not an instant success. It wasn’t until a year after it opened that it became a phenomenon. That’s when regular Vic Bergeron — of Trader Vic’s fame — brought a guest with him, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Soon after, Caen raved about the Mandarin and the phones went crazy.
The Polk Street restaurant became a hot spot, especially for younger diners. Chiang recalled one large group of scruffy-looking people in their 20s who came in several times, always ordering bottles of Dom Perignon and always paying in cash. It wasn’t until the third visit that she learned they were a rock band named Jefferson Airplane.
As the Mandarin’s success grew, Chiang saw the need to move to a bigger, better location. She found that in 1968, when she took the Mandarin to a 300-seat restaurant space in the brand-new Ghirardelli Square development.
It was a grandiose endeavor that cost a million dollars to build, and with an ornate design that was indicative of her immaculate tastes. The crowds followed. At the height of its popularity, seven hostesses worked the front door; among its patrons were the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Tony Bennett and Elton John.
Meanwhile, Chiang established herself as the consummate hostess.
She would work the VIP room in her custom-made elegant gowns and ornate jewelry, becoming a seminal figure within the San Francisco society set and a local ambassador for international celebrities.
The food at the Mandarin was legendary as well. In a 1988 review, Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer remarked that the minced squab was “a perfect dish: Leaves of iceberg lettuce, trimmed to resemble bowls, become the container for a mixture that includes crisp rice noodles and a fine mince of squab, mushrooms and water chestnut — unforgettable.”
She also evolved into an astute businesswoman, opening a second branch of the Mandarin in Beverly Hills in 1975. A larger, broader impact occurred in the ’80s, when she opened the Mandarette Chinese Cafe, also in Southern California. It was a more casual restaurant, opened with her son, Philip, who had decided to get into the restaurant business after completing art school. The lower-priced restaurant concept would eventually become the model for the now-ubiquitous chain P.F. Chang’s, which Philip founded in 1993 with Paul Fleming.
Along the way, Cecilia Chiang split amicably with her husband, whom she never divorced. She bought a home in St. Francis Wood, becoming the first non-Caucasian in the affluent neighborhood.
Chiang was a touchstone within the food community, teaching cooking class in the restaurant every Tuesday, attracting the likes of Alice Waters and Marion Cunningham.
Her role as the gracious mentor gracious mentor of Chinese food only intensified after she sold the Mandarin in 1991; it would eventually close in 2006.
She consulted on the menus at Betelnut and Shanghai 1930, two modern ventures that carried the torch of sophisticated Chinese restaurants in San Francisco in the post-Mandarin era.
Chiang received the James Beard Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, and was the subject of “Soul of a Banquet,” a 2014 documentary by filmmaker Wayne Wang (“The Joy Luck Club”).
Well into her 90s, she dined out regularly at the hottest restaurants in San Francisco, often displaying more energy and vivacity than people a third her age. She attended food festivals, A-list parties, and film premieres.
Within food circles, she was the closest thing to royalty in the Bay Area. Her presence in any setting drew rapt attention. Chefs would pay their respects. Like any great hospitality professional, she seemed to remember every name and face.
This story has been updated to add confirmation from Chiang’s family.
Paolo Lucchesi, the former food editor of the Chronicle, is editorial director at Resy. Tara Duggan is The Chronicle’s assistant food editor. Email [email protected] and [email protected].