It’s the day after Lunar New Year, and even though it’s early February, the balcony door in chefs Lisa and Peter Chang’s modern Bethesda apartment is wide open. Lisa eyes the smoke alarm as pork riblets sear in one saute pan and chiles hit the shimmering oil in another. These are the beginnings of two of Lisa’s favorite make-at-home dishes: glazed sweet-and-sour pork ribs, flavored with scallions, star anise, ginger and cumin seeds, and a zesty stir-fry of tofu skin, scrambled eggs and Chinese celery.
She and her family — Peter, their daughter, Lydia, and Peter’s mother, Ronger Wang, who’s visiting from China — are finally able to celebrate the holiday. The night before, they worked at the Changs’ packed fine-dining flagship restaurant a mile away, Q by Peter Chang.
Lydia, 31, sets the table with a bright, floral cloth and a bundle of longan fruit as a centerpiece. Wang mounds peanuts, pork, tofu and vegetables onto a mustard green leaf draped over her left hand and, in a flash of dexterity, forms a perfect triangular dumpling known as a wrap of delicacies. She completes a dozen, then wraps a dozen more in tofu skins.
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Three generations of Chang women run the show, the celebration doing double-duty as a tasting session of dishes that may make it onto the menu at the family’s newest restaurant, Mama Chang, which opened in Fairfax City a month later. Lisa’s home cooking — and dishes from the family’s home region of Hubei province in central China — take center stage at the 200-seat restaurant, a departure from the hot-and-numbing Sichuan-influenced cooking for which Peter is known.
“At Mama Chang, I as a chef am not as important as my wife, because this restaurant — the idea, the cooking, the style — actually comes from her,” says Peter, 56. (He, Lisa and his 77-year-old mother speak through an interpreter.)
Lydia puts it more bluntly. “At home,” she says, “she is a better cook than my father, period. Before we started working together, I never even tasted my father’s cooking, only my mother’s and grandmother’s. He cooks for a job. She does it for fun.”
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The flurry of activity continues. Lisa, 58, dishes up soy-braised beef with tiny whole potatoes and tops rice noodles with pickled long beans, pickled mustard greens and chile oil. Then she scrambles eggs and tosses them with sauteed tomatoes, Maggi Seasoning and scallions to crown longevity noodles (a New Year’s must) and stir-fries smoked pork belly, smoked tofu, green peppers and Chinese leeks.
Hubei cuisine is more ingredient-driven than Sichuan, with a focus on fish and “a lot of fresh seasonal vegetables, like lotus root, Chinese squash, snap peas and Chinese celery,” Lisa says. “You can describe Hubei cuisine as ‘fragrant spicy,’ where flavors come from vegetables and chile peppers, rather than Sichuan peppercorns.”
As Lisa cooks, Peter preps ingredients, a sous-chef role he’s not accustomed to, considering that the Changs’ other eight restaurants in Maryland and Virginia all bear his name.
In 2011, Peter teamed up with business partner Gen Lee (now a silent partner) and started opening restaurants of his own. Under the terms of their negotiated status, Peter and Lisa can live and work in the United States, but if they leave the country, they can’t return. And the business must be in Lydia’s name. She obtained a green card in 2014 and intends to apply for citizenship in December.
Less well known is that Lisa was also a highly regarded chef in China, specializing in pastry. When she and Peter met in 1984, working on a Yangtze River cruise boat, she was his superior. At the Chinese Embassy, they were a two-for-one deal, cooking side by side, as they would at restaurants in Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee. A significant part of Lisa’s job now is training cooks. As their business gained notoriety, Lisa decided to let her husband take the limelight. (But like parents showing off toddlers, she will happily show you cellphone pictures of her moon cakes, butterfly-shaped shrimp dumplings and delicate begonia-shaped pastries with red bean filling.)
Lisa's real name is Hongying. Being interviewed in 2006, she chose to go by Lisa "because it was easy to write, easy to remember, and there were already too many Helens," she says, chuckling. She was born and raised in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, the third of six children. Her father was a military driver, her mother a ticket taker on a bus. Because both parents worked, her job, starting at age 10, was to cook for the family. After high school, she worked at a hotel for foreigners and became interested in pastries. The chef saw potential in her and for three years taught her to make dumplings, noodles, sauces, dim sum, breads and sweet and savory pastries.
It was unusual for women to work in professional kitchens. “You’d see a few here and there in the pastry department,” Lisa says. “Another master would tell my master, ‘Don’t teach her because she’ll be having kids in five years and will leave.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here for the rest of my life. I’ll just prove you wrong with my actions. Words don’t mean anything.’”
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In 1983, she started working on the cruise boat and became a certified pastry chef in 1985, ranked among the top 10 in Hubei. She and Peter married in 1987. Lisa took off the year before and after Lydia’s birth in 1988, and then for a year, she traded off working the nine-day cruise with Peter. In the fourth year, Peter’s mother moved 150 miles from their home village to Wuhan to take care of Lydia. “So I was stuck with my grandmother for 12 years,” Lydia jokes. “Well, she was stuck with me.”
Share this articleShareWhen Lydia was 10, Lisa moved 720 miles north to manage the kitchen at the Tianlun Wangchao Hotel in Beijing (now the Sunworld Dynasty Hotel). But she returned a year later, ending that career trajectory, to be closer to her daughter. Peter then went to Beijing, where he was offered the position in Washington.
Walking away from the embassy was heart-wrenching, but they wanted to give their daughter a better life than they had in China, and they saw opportunity. The Chinese restaurants they visited in Washington weren’t very good.
A trope popular among American chefs today — learning how to cook at grandma's knee — is a far cry from Peter's experience. He was born in 1963, after the Great Famine claimed an estimated 36 million lives, among them Ronger Wang's 45-year-old father and two of Peter's aunts.
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Ronger was a farmer, but the crops and animals raised belonged to the state under its collective-farming system. “My whole life was under the shadow of hunger,” Peter says. “We didn’t have rice. Our congee [rice porridge] was watery with very little rice in it. Drinking watery soup, you feel hungry again very soon. I didn’t really eat well until I went to Wuhan in 1981 for cooking school.”
Monthly visits from his father, an itinerant medical practitioner, were Peter’s happiest childhood memories. “He’d come home with a kilogram of pork. My mom had to cook it in a porcelain pot buried in the cinders to keep the fragrance from getting out so the neighbors wouldn’t know we had meat in the house. She’d wake us up in the middle of the night, and we’d eat it all. No scallions or peppers or soy sauce added to it. I remember that pure pork flavor.”
The family’s lot improved in the early 1980s when the government’s Responsibility System allowed farmers, working under contract with the collective, to consume and sell some of what they raised.
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“In Chinese villages, weddings, festivals, children’s 100-day birthday celebrations, my mom’s mom would help cook the dishes because they admired her cooking. Then my mom became the person people would come to for help for their important occasions,” Peter says. Before leaving China in January to visit her family in Bethesda, she made dozens of wraps of delicacies for friends and family at their request. She learned how to make them from her mother and is passing the knowledge on to Lisa for Mama Chang’s menu. Her pan-fried tofu with bean sprouts, a typical 100-day celebration dish, is already on it.
Lydia, who has a master’s degree in international business from King’s College London, is director of business development for the restaurant group, and sees her role as supporting her parents’ dream of revamping the image of Chinese food in America. She nudged her father to open Q and helped shape Mama Chang. She keeps her eye on trends, such as the popularity of street food, during annual research trips to China, and she influences menu decisions.
As their New Year’s lunch ends, her father worries whether the public will take to Mama Chang. “What I’m doing now is different from what the Taiwan or Hong Kong restaurant owners did in the past,” he says. “I want to guide consumers, to show them something different.”
Two months later, there’s an hour wait for a table at Mama Chang at 4 p.m. on a Saturday. The public, it seems, is taking to the place just fine.
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