Chronicle No. 54 · People
Cecilia Chiang Walked Out of a War and Changed How America Eats
She spent six months on foot escaping occupied China. Two decades later she was rewriting the American idea of Chinese food.
Cecilia Chiang was born in Wuxi on 18 September 1920 into a large, comfortable Beijing household. In 1942, with the country occupied, she and her sister walked out. The journey to Chongqing took nearly six months on foot.
She taught Mandarin to the American and Soviet embassies, and worked for the American Office of Strategic Services. She reached San Francisco in 1960.
What she found there was chop suey. American Chinese restaurants served a flattened, apologetic cuisine designed not to alarm anyone. Chiang, who had never worked in a restaurant, opened The Mandarin on Polk Street - a small room, in the early 1960s - and simply refused to do that.
- She cooked the northern and regional dishes of her own upbringing rather than a menu built for timid diners
- She put potstickers, smoked tea duck and Sichuan dishes in front of Americans who had never seen them
- She refused the red-lacquer decor convention and gave the food a serious dining room
- In 1968 she moved The Mandarin to a 300-seat space in Ghirardelli Square
The influence ran through the whole of American cooking. She taught Julia Child, fed and educated James Beard, and became a lifelong friend of Alice Waters. She sold the restaurant in 1991; it closed in 2006. In 2013 she received the James Beard Foundation award for lifetime achievement. She died in San Francisco on 28 October 2020, aged 100.
Her career answers a question every operator eventually faces: how far do you bend the offer to suit the market? Chiang's answer was that you educate the market instead. It took longer. It lasted longer too.
“I wanted to introduce real Chinese food to America”
Lesson: Refusing to serve a watered-down version of your own culture is a business decision, and sometimes the right one.
