Grace Young wants to keep Chinatown restaurants in business

In the year When Miss Yang saw these familiar streets empty during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she realized that the way of life she had taken for granted was suddenly threatened. Misinformation about Asian-Americans carrying the virus has hit Chinese businesses hard. “Waiters were standing still, businesses were losing up to 80% of their customers,” she recalls, at the grand opening for Chinese New Year over stir-fried cauliflower and snow pea shoots at May Sum Cafe on Peel Street. The celebration will last until February 5. “I realized I hadn’t really understood how much Chinatown meant to me.”

Usually shy, Ms. Yang has become a strong advocate for New York’s Chinatown. She insists that multi-generational mom-and-pop shops are an important part of American history: “Many of these entrepreneurs came to this country with nothing, and through hard work and dedication they made the American dream a reality.” Since early 2020, she has broadcast video interviews with local business owners and raised money to buy food from Chinatown restaurants and deliver it to those in need, among other efforts. Her work in preserving and sharing Chinese culinary traditions earned her the Julia Child Award and the James Beard Humanitarian of the Year Award last year.

“I didn’t know I had an activist heart in my soul,” says Ms. Young. But somewhere along the line I realized that as a historian of Cantonese cuisine and media-savvy, I had the right qualities to be a voice for the voiceless.

Although her parents prided themselves on making traditional Cantonese stir-fry and soup for their two children, Ms Yang said she got her love of cooking from Julia Child. At a young age, she began watching “The French Chef” on television and soon was sending self-addressed envelopes to WGBH each week for copies of the recipes. “I loved her lifestyle,” Ms. Young recalled. “I wanted to be like her,” she says, fascinated by Childe’s unconventionality, a skilled cook and occasional exotic French cook.

Ms. Young vividly remembers the day her mother let her make the children’s recipe for brioche. “They were nice and golden and puffy, and the pure butter flavor was crazy,” she says. “It made me realize that I wanted another recipe and another way to cook.” She convinced her father to take her to a local book signing at Child’s, where only Asians were present. Ms. Young recalls: “It never happened that we weren’t watching. Her signed “French Chef Cookbook,” along with her family’s wok and fine china, are now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where she serves on the Advisory Board of Food History Programs.

At the age of 13, Ms. Young convinced Josephine Araldo, a chef and teacher in San Francisco, to let her wash dishes and do other odd jobs in some French cooking classes. ” she says. A high school internship turned into a full-time job in college with recipe developer and food stylist Stevie Bass. “It was life-changing,” she recalls. “I loved trying recipes, like a lab experiment.”

In 1979, Ms. Young headed to New York for a job in a General Foods test kitchen. She thought she would return to San Francisco after a year, but fell in love with the dynamics of New York City and loved living away from her parents’ control and expectations. “My mother saw working in the kitchen as menial work,” she says. “They wanted me to be a concert pianist or a doctor.”

She worked for Rebus, a book packaging company that produced cookbooks for Time Life Books. In her 30s, she learned more than 40 recipes and realized she didn’t know how to make home-cooked meals. “A lot of the comfort foods I grew up with, I didn’t take the time to learn,” she says. “I know that if I record all of my parents’ recipes, it will be a gift to my family and to the next generation.”

It took a little fun to get her parents on board: “My mom used to cook, and I’d say, ‘I don’t remember it tasting like this when I was a kid,’ and ‘Real food takes over.’ Most of the time, you don’t have time for that,’ he said. But Talking About Food, which started as a cookbook, eventually encouraged her parents to talk about their past. A Chinatown restaurant in the 1940s. “It was a really wonderful way to learn not only my family’s recipes, but my family history,” she says. “The Art of the Chinese Kitchen” (1999) launched Ms. Yang’s career in preserving and preserving the culinary traditions of Chinese Americans. Other books followed, “Wok’s Breath” (2004) and “Wake Up to the Edge of Heaven” (2010).

Grace Young prepares a vegetable roast in the kitchen at home. Jingyu Lin for the Wall Street Journal

Although Ms. Yang didn’t start wok cooking regularly until she was in her 30s, she gained some notoriety as a wok evangelist, eager to simplify the traditional Asian pan for home cooks. “People call it a stir-fry, but it’s more. You can steam, boil, poach, fry, fry, smoke. “I use a wok to cook eggs, spatchcock chicken and popcorn,” she says. She always packs her wok on hand when she travels, and she has too many to count. “They all tell a different story,” she says.

Outside of the cafes on Peel Street, Chinatown seems to have returned to its bustling self. However, Ms. Yang noted that the outbreak has decimated many long-established Chinatown businesses in New York and around the country. “Chinese cities across America are experiencing decreased foot traffic, lack of tourism, increases in robberies and vandalism, and late-night traffic jams, all attributed to anti-Asian hate crimes,” she said. “A lot of businesses let their employees go home early for safety reasons, and local people don’t feel safe going out at night.”

Before the outbreak, when people asked Ms. Yang what her favorite Chinatown restaurant was, she encouraged them to cook at home. “I’m a cookbook writer! I want people to cook from my books!” she explains. But she realized that Chinatown wouldn’t survive if these restaurants didn’t survive. This year, instead of preparing a big meal of home-cooked Cantonese food for her husband and friends, she’s celebrating Chinese New Year with a feast of food from various local restaurants: “In my I’ve never eaten so much food in my entire life.