Joyce Chen (née Liao Chia-ai , September 14, 1917 – August 23, 1994) was a Chinese-American chef, restaurateur, author, television personality, and entrepreneur.
Joyce Chen was credited with popularizing northern-style Chinese cuisine in the United States, coining the name "Peking Raviolis" for potstickers, inventing and holding a design patent for a flat bottom wok with handle (also known as a stir fry pan), and developing the first line of bottled Chinese stir fry sauces for the US market.
Starting in 1958, she operated several popular Chinese restaurants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chen was diagnosed with dementia in 1985, and died in 1994. Her accomplishments and influence on American cuisine were honored by the US Postal Service and by the city of Cambridge.
Early life
Joyce Chen was born in Peking (now spelled Beijing in English), the youngest of nine children of a high-ranking Qing dynasty official, during the Republican era under Sun Yat-sen. Her wealthy father, a railroad administrator and city executive, could afford to hire a family cook. In her book, Joyce Chen Cook Book, she later said that she grew up with a family chef who left to cook for her father's friend, "Uncle Li", who became the Chinese ambassador to Russia. At that point, her mother and her governess cooked the family meals, and Joyce watched and learned from them.
Chen and husband Thomas (m. 1943; div. 1966) with their children Henry (b. 1944; d. 2007) and Helen (b. 1948) left Shanghai (and China for the last time) on April 6, 1949, as the Communists were taking over the country. The family was on the second-to-last boat to leave Shanghai before the port closed. On April 21, Chen and her family settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thomas Chen worked as an importer of fine art, while Joyce was a housewife raising two children, a dramatic change from her job in China as an insurance broker (an uncommon vocation for women in China at that time). She gave birth to another son, Stephen, in 1952. In 1957, she first thought that her cooking might be popular when she made pumpkin cookies and Chinese egg rolls for a bake sale fundraiser at the Buckingham School in Cambridge. She was surprised to hear that her then-unfamiliar Chinese snacks had sold out within an hour, and she was encouraged to make more. Chen had already become adept at finding or substituting hard-to-get ingredients, and adapting her recipes to American tastes.
Restaurants
Chen opened her first restaurant, Joyce Chen Restaurant, at 617 Concord Avenue in Cambridge in 1958. According to her son Stephen, here she pioneered the all-you-can-eat Chinese dinner buffet to boost sales on otherwise-slow Tuesday and Wednesday nights. She also used the buffet format to allow customers to sample unfamiliar authentic dishes at their own pace. She promoted healthy Chinese cooking and refused to use Red Dye No. 2 and other food coloring at her restaurants. For Chinese-speaking and English-speaking staff and customers to communicate more easily, Chen introduced the practice of numbering menu items.
Chen introduced northern Chinese (Mandarin) and Shanghainese dishes to Boston, including Peking duck, moo shu pork, hot and sour soup, and potstickers, which she called "Peking Ravioli", sometimes shortened to "Ravs". The first restaurant operated for thirteen years, closing in 1971. Members of Bolt, Beranek and Newman's IMP team, when they were working on the first IMPs to create the ARPANET in 1969, would eat Chen's food at her restaurant, which was located next door to BBN.
After her divorce in 1966, Chen sold the original restaurant to her ex-husband, who converted it in 1972 to a Japanese eatery called Osaka. With her divorce from Thomas Chen, she legally reverted to using her maiden name, Joyce Liao, but continued use the Joyce Chen moniker for her business. As a single mother both encumbered and assisted by her three children, she managed to open a second restaurant in 1967, called The Joyce Chen Small Eating Place. It was located between Harvard University and MIT in Central Square, Cambridge, at 302 Massachusetts Avenue. Chen's son, Stephen, later noted that the opening of this restaurant changed the landscape of the Central Square area in Cambridge. Originally, it was a retail and industrial area, dominated by a NECCO (New England Confectionery Company) factory. People lined up to get Chen's Chinese food at this small restaurant, which seated 60 people. According to Stephen Chen, it was at this restaurant that his mother introduced the Northern style of dim sum, and the now popular "soup dumplings" (shao long bao). The restaurant was very popular with computer hackers. It operated for 21 years and closed in 1988.