About Cecilia Chiang

Chiang grew up in China and fled to Taiwan after the Communist Revolution in 1949. Her family resettled in Japan, where she opened her first restaurant. In 1958, on a trip to visit a sister in San Francisco, she wound up opening another restaurant. At first, Americans — raised on chop suey and egg drop soup — didn’t know what to think of Chiang’s northern Chinese cooking. But by the late 1960s her restaurant, The Mandarin, had become a regular fixture of the Bay Area restaurant scene. Chiang went on to write several cookbooks, including The Mandarin Way. She lives in the Bay Area.