Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown, cookbook by Brandon Jew, chef-owner of the San Francisco restaurant, and the woman who inspired it

For Chinese-American chef Brandon Jew, it was the death of his beloved grandmother, Ying Ying, that led him away from Western fine dining and back to his roots.

“I didn’t understand that I had to open Mister Jiu’s until Ying Ying – our name for our paternal grandmother in Toisanese – was diagnosed with cancer,” he writes in the introduction to Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown – Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food (2021), which he co-wrote with Tienlon Ho. “She was, at seventy-nine years old, the athletic, hilarious, strong-willed matriarch of our family. I was twenty-six and cooking on the line at Quince, a legendary restaurant in San Francisco, executing perfect Ricotta Sformato with artichokes, radicchio, and Umbrian lentil vinaigrette.

“I loved my job. I loved to work. I had not taken a vacation in what seemed like years. But my Ying Ying was dying, and with her a history in recipes and love. Ying Ying was our family’s head cook. She and I spoke the same language: heat, time, taste. But Ying Ying’s noh mai gai was a long way from Ricotta Sformato. Which meant every day at work in the kitchen, I was a long way from home.

“I had spent a solid chunk of my childhood in Ying Ying’s kitchen in Richmond [in San Francisco]. She would cook the northern Chinese food of her childhood and the southern Chinese food of my grandfather’s, and I would clean my plate; then she would refill my plate and praise me for being a good, big-boned boy. I did not tire of it. I had grown up speaking English but my culinary language was Chinese.

“We were a household that swung easily between meat loaf and haahm yu, fermented salted fish. And, always, there was Ying Ying in the kitchen in the middle of everything. Even when we could not come to her, she came to us, braving the trek to the suburbs.