For decades, the crowds outside House of Nanking have been a fixture of San Francisco’s Chinatown, with lines frequently wrapping around the block to get a seat in the cramped, high-energy dining room, under the iconic, multicolored sign that crowns Kearny Street. But for Kathy Fang, the restaurant’s heir apparent, her presence in that kitchen represents a sharp deviation from the “American Dream” her parents envisioned for her—a deviation that initially caused them deep dismay.
Peter Fang, the restaurant’s legendary patriarch, and his wife did not build House of Nanking so their daughter could inherit it, Kathy Fang told Fortune in a recent interview. To them, cooking was a necessity born of survival, not a career choice for the educated. “For my parents being very traditional, they also didn’t want me to do it,” she explained. “In fact, we have a saying that, you know, if you don’t cut it in school, you can always go be a cook because it’s considered manual labor. You don’t need to have a proper education to go work in a kitchen.”
