Taiwan-born chef George Chen, whose family immigrated to Los Angeles, in the US state of California, in 1967, remembers vividly how his classmates would look at his school lunch of braised pork and Chinese sauerkraut between two pieces of bread.
“‘Oh, God, what are you eating? That’s gross,’” Chen recalls during a recent busy lunch hour at his San Francisco restaurant and bar, China Live, on the edge of the oldest Chinatown in North America. “And now everybody wants the braised pork and Chinese sauerkraut. Hopefully, the perception of Chinese [food] has now come a long way.”
The immigrant kid who felt he had to hide his food has built a reputation for serving Chinese fine dining in the Bay Area. At China Live, Chen is like a circus ringmaster, overseeing a dumpling-making station, a stone oven roasting Peking duck, a noodle station and a dessert station churning sesame soft serve.
With all this, he hopes to one day revive his upstairs restaurant, Eight Tables, where course-by-course dinners ranged from US$88 to US$188. In addition, he and his wife, Cindy Wong-Chen, are preparing to launch a similar concept, Asia Live, in Santa Clara, also in California.
