Cecilia Chiang, Who Brought Authentic Chinese Food to America, Dies at 100

[DinahMoeHum]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/dining/cecilia-chiang-dead.html

Cecilia Chiang, whose San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin, introduced American diners in the 1960s to the richness and variety of authentic Chinese cuisine, died on Wednesday at her home in San Francisco. She was 100.

Ms. Chiang came to the United States from China as a daughter of wealth who had fled the Japanese during World War II, traveling nearly 700 miles on foot. Once in San Francisco, she proceeded, largely by happenstance and almost single-handedly, to bring Chinese cuisine from the chop suey and chow mein era into the more refined one of today, enticing diners with the dishes she ate growing up in her family’s converted Ming-era palace in Beijing.

The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.

In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/dining/cecilia-chiang-dead.html

[intrepidity]

1. My deepest gratitude for Sizzling Rice Soup and Kung Pao

Thank You!

[unc70]

2. Loved the Mandarin

Are there most every visit in the 70s-80s. Truly exceptional.