Joyce Chen (chef)

Did You Know?

• Chen was born in Beijing, the youngest of nine children of a high-ranking Qing dynasty official.
• She and her husband Thomas left Shanghai on April 6, 1949, on the second-to-last boat before the port closed.

Restaurants

Joyce Chen launched her first restaurant, Joyce Chen Restaurant, on Concord Avenue in Cambridge in 1958. To draw customers on slow Tuesday and Wednesday nights, she created the all-you-can-eat Chinese dinner buffet, which also let diners try unfamiliar authentic dishes at their own pace. She championed healthy cooking and banned Red Dye No. 2 and other food colorings from her kitchens. To help Chinese- and English-speaking staff and customers communicate, she gave menu items numbers.

Chen brought northern Chinese and Shanghainese foods like Peking duck, moo shu pork, hot and sour soup, and potstickers—which she dubbed "Peking Ravioli" or "Ravs"—to Boston. That first spot operated for thirteen years, shutting in 1971. In 1969, engineers from Bolt, Beranek and Newman’s IMP team ate there while building the first IMPs for the ARPANET. Following her 1966 divorce, Chen sold the original restaurant to her ex-husband, who turned it into a Japanese place in 1972.

She opened a second restaurant in 1967, the Joyce Chen Small Eating Place, on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge’s Central Square. Seating 60, it ran for 21 years until 1988. There she introduced northern-style dim sum and soup dumplings, known as shao long bao.

Career highlights

After opening her first restaurant in 1958, Chen began teaching Chinese cooking at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and the Boston Center for Adult Education in 1960, with long waiting lists for her classes. In 1962, she published the Joyce Chen Cook Book privately after publishers balked at her insistence on color pictures; she pre-sold over 6,000 copies at her restaurants. A publisher later sold an additional 70,000 copies, with further reprintings.

Boston cardiologist Paul Dudley White wrote the foreword, praising her use of healthier ingredients. In 1967, Chen starred in Joyce Chen Cooks on National Educational Television (NET, later PBS). Twenty-six episodes were filmed on the same set as The French Chef at WGBH in Boston, both produced by Ruth Lockwood. Julia Child was a regular visitor at Chen's restaurant.

The show aired across the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia; eleven original programs remain on the WGBH website. Chen discussed substituting readily available American ingredients for hard-to-find Chinese ones, and introduced American audiences to the wok and the Chinese chef's knife.

Final years and legacy

In 1968, Chen took her son Stephen and daughter Helen on a round-the-world trip on Pan Am Flight 001. She traveled to China in 1972, the same year President Nixon visited. Stephen, then a Boston University undergraduate, took a one-day crash course in cinematography at WGBH and filmed footage used in a documentary, Joyce Chen's China, which aired nationally on PBS in May 1973. A few months later, five intruders who had seen the film committed a home invasion against the Chen family.

In 1976, Chen severely injured her right hand when she dropped a large glass jar of stir-fry sauce; microsurgery did not fully restore its use. After the injury, she began forgetting phone numbers of food vendors, and by 1983 she had stopped relying on vendors. Her memory worsened, and in 1985 she was officially diagnosed with multi-infarct dementia, though some accounts state Alzheimer's disease. Stephen cared for her at home until 1992, when she moved to Fairlawn Nursing Home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

She died of cardiac arrest on August 23, 1994, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. In 1998, her contributions were described in Beard House magazine. The city of Cambridge held its first Festival of Dumplings in September 2012 to honor her 95th birthday, with subsequent festivals in 2013 and 2014. The New York Historical Society exhibit Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (2014–2015) featured her contributions.

Business legacy

After her dementia diagnosis in 1985, Chen retired. Her daughter Helen Chen became CEO of Joyce Chen Inc., while son Stephen ran restaurant operations. The building was purchased by Just-A-Start, renovated, and reopened as a childcare facility in 1999; it was demolished in 2005 for residential units. Helen continued Joyce Chen Products until January 2003, when she sold it to Columbian Home Products.

She later wrote three cookbooks and in 2007 developed her own cookware line, Helen's Asian Kitchen, for Harold Import Company. In January 2020, Columbian Home Products closed its Terre Haute, Indiana plant and laid off 82 employees, having sold the Joyce Chen brand to Honey-Can-Do. As of 2021, Stephen is president of Joyce Chen Foods, Inc., which sells sauces, oils, condiments, and spices inspired by his mother's recipes, including gluten-free, kosher, and lower-sodium options with no added MSG. In 2006, the line added frozen potstickers.