Eric Cheng opened the first Sun Wah BBQ in New York City in the early 1980s. He had nine feet of storefront, but it was a lot to him. He had grown up in southern China, a student from the city who had escaped his fate of being assigned to a collective farm. He swam to Hong Kong, clinging to a spare tire for eight hours.
He moved with his wife, Lynda, to New York City in the mid-70s, carrying less than $100. He worked in a Chinese restaurant until the owner told him he could not take time off to help his wife, who had given birth to their first child, Kelly.
So he quit.
They had three more children. He became a Chinese barbecue master and opened Sun Wah BBQ, and after years on Mulberry Street, when the landlord asked for more rent, he looked beyond Manhattan. He knew people in Chicago, and, in 1987, reopened Sun Wah in a modest storefront on Argyle Street in Uptown.
Kelly Cheng, now 32, explained this on a slow Wednesday night at Sun Wah, which left that home on Argyle in late October after 22 years. It relocated around the corner, in a former auto repair shop on Broadway. Kelly is rail thin, with a ponytail and glasses. She wore a zip-up hoodie with pink Crocs and talked about her father as she prepared to carve yet another roast duck tableside — pulling dishes of pickled radish from a refrigerator, arranging plates. She gripped the front of her cart, then began to roll it.
Her sister breezed by.
“They left,” Laura said, not stopping, nodding at the lacquered bird. Kelly craned her head at the table, which was now empty. They’ve had a few service issues lately. Kelly sighed and went back to her story:
“Our father is that American Dream thing, that idea that you couldn’t make it happen so you set out and did things your own way and made your own future. So, yes, there are expectations on us, his children. Believe me, we know the step we’ve taken is not the step a typical Chinese restaurant would take — we have friends at other restaurants worried about us. It’s not normal for a Chinese restaurant to spend three quarters of a million dollars on a new space to serve high-quality but traditional Chinese food.”
It’s also not normal for a revamped Chinese restaurant these days to remain firmly Chinese, to avoid dabbling in Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai. “Our compromise,” Kelly said, “is our look,” which is big and bright, with exposed brick — a setting so contemporary that Laura and Kelly openly wonder if it has turned off some elderly Asian customers, more comfortable with tighter, more lived-in dining rooms.
Yet, since the changes, since Kelly and Laura and their brother, Mike, inherited Sun Wah BBQ from their semiretired father in July, a slow Wednesday means Kelly and Laura prepare a duck tableside every 10 minutes or so, rather than every four minutes or so, which is what weekends have become at Sun Wah.
Since the move, it’s gone overnight from a well-regarded, low-key Argyle institution to a higher-profile Uptown foodie destination with a renewed vitality, a broader clientele and a much-buzzed-about duck. A duck that Kelly herself introduced to the restaurant, a point her father notes with an amazed shake of his head. “In 35 years, I prepared two Peking ducks,” he said. “The first day she offered it, she prepared 12.”
That means, at times, the line stretches to the door, and tables are filled with more white people, which means more people who eat in courses, rather than the traditional Chinese style of eating everything at once. It means more full houses, though they had a 1,500-square-foot dining room on Argyle and now boast at least 4,000 square feet. It means Kelly has become so efficient she can strip a roast duck in less than 90 seconds. And it means a Chinese restaurant more familiar with being admired than loudly praised is getting its due.
Said Chicago chef Graham Elliot Bowles, who has eaten at Sun Wah repeatedly since it moved: “Any time you have an ethnic restaurant that is really authentic and it becomes better known, their temptation is to appeal to a wider public — so you hope they don’t gentrify from a cuisine standpoint. I don’t know if it’s better or worse than when it was on Argyle, but it’s still really delicious and still authentic and made without a lot of fuss.”
“It’s so spacious and airy now compared to old-school Chinese restaurants in Chicago, which used to be the smokiest places in town and still feel kind of dank,” said Greg Hall, brewmaster of Goose Island, who eats at Sun Wah often (and sells a lot of beer there too). “I ate at Momofuku (in New York) two days after eating at Sun Wah and, really, as much as I love (acclaimed chef) David Chang’s food, it is not any better than Sun’s roasted duck.”
Oh, and one other thing this popularity means: The Cheng kids, who argue all day and remain at odds over what a Chinese restaurant should be in the 21st century, will be working together for a long time.
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“I worry about them,” said Lynda, who grew up in Hong Kong. “They always argue, always argue. They are not together on things, but they have plans. Everybody’s, maybe, too different for their own good. Kelly is like her father — she doesn’t think, she moves so fast, wants to try everything new, eats at other restaurants, comes back and says, ‘Dad, we need to try this!’ Laura is slower, always thinking ahead. She went to culinary school, knows how restaurants work outside of here. Mike, my son, he is learning barbecue, he is apprenticing now and taking his father’s job. It takes years, and he’s very lazy — he needs a push, right?”
Mike went further than his mom. He described Laura as a “drill sergeant,” always in the white chef’s coat. Told this, a tight smile spread across Laura’s face. She gathered her thoughts.
“I don’t have anyone I can talk to about this,” she sighed, waving her hand out across the dining room. “I take a lot of crap from my family. All they know is Sun Wah. They say, ‘This is reality. School can’t teach you this.’ But I have had experience outside of this and I feel like — you know how when you’re little and you want to be a fireman or a teacher but you have experiences and become what you become? I feel like I missed out on that chunk. I’m here again. And my sister and I don’t see eye to eye anymore. She thinks in grays. She says I see everything too black and white. But some things are black and white. I’m not even a big fan of sweet and sour.
“But on good days, I want to stay here forever, and the possibilities feel endless.”
Laura, 23, speaks in a high, sly voice and moves stiffly. Kelly is the face of Sun Wah, a funny, charming duck carver (who once admitted to a table that their bird looked like a baby). Mike, 26, says little, hangs back. They put in 70-hour weeks now, though found themselves here at a different stages in life.
Laura recently graduated from Kendall College and trained at the Prairie Grass Cafe in Northbrook. Mike served in the Army for three years, stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. And Kelly, who earned an MBA in international marketing from DePaul University, was in her first year of law school in Grand Rapids, Mich., when she received the call from her father: He wanted to retire. Would she come back? Would they all take over?
At the end of the transition, their father said, “Whatever decisions we make now, we make,” Mike recalled. “He said if we have problems, he’s here. Now we fight all the time — stock, what to serve.”
Also, they live together — the parents, the kids, Mike’s wife, Irene — in a single home in Northbrook.
Eric is 59, his short, black hair boyishly parted to the side, streaked with gray. His wife runs the family’s Sun Hing Food tofu factory in Edgewater. They have a third daughter, Cindy Spencer, 29, who is a marketing manager for Prinz picture frame company in Northbrook. She avoided the family business. She said she doesn’t need to feel guilty — “my father makes sure I feel guilty about it all the time.”
“I think it’s hard for them to separate work and family,” she said. “When they have a disagreement at work, they have to leave it at work. But that’s something you learn. I have disagreements at work, but I don’t see those people when I get home. Remember, some of them may want to do this now and some don’t see themselves doing anything else. And it’s not like this is something my parents planned (for them), either.”
Tensions remain high.
Tim Tsang worries for them. Tsang, 19, expects to run Hon Kee restaurant on Argyle, co-owned by his father, Paul. When the Chengs were on Argyle, they had a more manageable business, he said. Though since Sun Wah moved, Hon Kee has seen a spike in its older Asian diners. But Tsang also said the neighborhood has changed. “There’s less Vietnamese and African-Americans now than when I was growing up (here), and way more Caucasians.”
Kelly said that’s partly why Sun Wah made changes, added microbrews, introduced new vegetables. Laura worries about watering down the authenticity. But now the restaurant has a future, she said. “I just can’t say it’ll be easy.”
