A NEW YORKER AT WORK
(Q&A INTERVIEW)
Jun 17th, 2018
Switching Roles By Putting On And Taking Off A Chef's Bib Apron
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Cathy Yan, 56, is the owner of Ju Feng Yuan, a Chinese restaurant that is located in Flushing, New York.
What's your restaurant like, and where is it?
Ju Feng Yuan is located at Flushing Main Street, New York. We cook traditional Chinese cuisine, including Shanghai and Shandong food. My husband was from Shandong, a province that belongs to the northern part of China; and I was born in Shanghai, a city in the southern region. We met and got married in New York. In 2003, I graduated from a cooking school in New York and decided to start up a restaurant that includes both northern and southern food. We named the restaurant Ju Feng Yuan, translated into English as "the garden that gathers delicious food."
What are some of the challenges of operating a restaurant?
Learning to balance the ingredients was the toughest obstacle I faced. During the first year of opening, I was the only chef at the restaurant, but I only knew how to cook southern Chinese cuisine. Northern and southern Chinese cuisine have different cooking methods, use different quantity of spice and sauce; the procedures of boiling soup are not the same as well. For instance, my husband always complained about the food I cooked was not salty at all, whereas I considered the northern Chinese cuisine had too much oil and salt.
How did you overcome that difficulty?
I learned to cook northern Chinese cuisine by watching videos online and asking neighbors who came to New York from the north part of China. That’s one way I'm still developing my cooking skills, and sometimes I cook new cuisine for my customers, even we have several professional chefs.
How do you balance your career between the owner of a restaurant and a chef?
As a chef, I enjoy cooking, and I would be satisfied when people tell me that the dishes I prepared are delicious, and they would come again. What's more, as the owner of Ju Feng Yuan, I have more responsibility than an ordinary chef: I need to contact with seasonal food suppliers, make budgets, and most importantly, lead the chefs to keep the high standard cooking skills and motivate them to cook new cuisines. In my spare time, I would go to the kitchen, wear my bib apron, discuss with other chefs, and create new cuisines. For me, switching my role from a chef to the owner of a restaurant is just like putting on or taking off the bib apron: not that easy at first, but I've got used to it now.
What's your recent creative cuisine?
I created a Luzhu(soy products and meat that are stewed with special sauce and spice) mixed-plate, and we are the only restaurant in New York that has such mixed-plate. A company in Long Island City is organizing a party tonight, and they ordered nine Luzhu mixed-plates! I cooked the special sauce, and another chef stewed the meat.
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The interview was in Chinese, and this Q&A is translated into English by Alice Zhang*