The Exploratorium December13th 2022
By MacKenzie Chung Fegan, Restaurant CriticOct 1, 2024 - San Francisco Chronicle
The problem with getting people together when you’re a restaurant family is that someone is always working. This was the case last Tuesday evening, when 40-odd Chungs (some odder than others *ba dum tss*) gathered to celebrate 50 years of Henry’s Hunan Restaurant in San Francisco. Cousin Eddy was there with his wife, Lorna, but his brother Jeff and sister-in-law Mary were holding down the fort over at the Church Street location. And since we had chosen to assemble at the Natoma Street restaurant, cousin Frank was mostly on his feet, manning the wok. He’s on the very edge of our family photo in his apron, having just run over from the kitchen.
Success found my grandparents Henry and Diana Chung later in life. They were in their 50s when they opened the original Hunan on Kearny Street in 1974 after 25 scrappy years of trying to make a go of it in the U.S. The rest is family lore: a call-out in a New York Times article about Chinatown, a New Yorker piece (titled “Frisco”) that asserted it was “the best Chinese restaurant in the world,” a cameo by my grandfather in Les Blank’s “Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers,” a cookbook peppered with “Chungist philosophy,” according to an ad in the Chronicle.
The Hunan Restaurant’s culinary legacy is significant — at one point Herb Caen reckoned there were more Hunan-style restaurants in San Francisco than there were in Hunan province — but its impact on the Chung clan is even more consequential. The success of the restaurant allowed us to bring over relatives who had been left behind, starting with my grandfather’s three children from his first marriage and their families, who suffered mightily during the Cultural Revolution. When they arrived, there were jobs for them; if you ask my relatives, every man, woman and child in Hunan is an excellent cook. By my uncle Meng Qio’s count, there are some 100 descendants of Henry Chung now in San Francisco.
My grandparents founded Henry's Hunan. 50 years later, their descendants threw them a very spicy par
Greg