From Merrill Lynch to wok station: the daughter of San Francisco’s Chinese food dynasty who defied her parents—by working alongside them

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.”

Her parents don’t know about “foodie” culture, she explained, and don’t even know how famous they’ve become. Speaking to Fortune as she releases the first-ever cookbook dedicated to her family’s restaurant, she said even that was a struggle.

“It took me decades,” she said about convincing her father to go along with it. “He thought that if he shared his recipes, people would just make it at home and not come to the restaurant anymore.” He didn’t understand his restaurant is a San Francisco institution, frequented by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Keanu Reeves, celebrities that her father wouldn’t—and didn’t—recognize anyway.

The House of Nanking on Kearny Street is a legendary eating institution that often has long lines of hungry diners hoping for a table. Renowned as much for it’s surly service as the food, it is worth the wait. Taken in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Michael Robinson Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Fang, who recently turned 40, shared Reeves was her favorite actor since high school, and the first time he visited her family’s restaurant, she begged her father not to make him wait in the queue stretching around the block, as it does every night. His response was that “everybody waits in line,” until she promised to get straight A’s, and he relented. What happened next summed everything up.

“[My dad] walks up to him and says something to him. Then looks at me and goes, ‘Kathy, come over, take a picture with him. It’s Sean Connery.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. My dad doesn’t know anybody, but he’s heard of Sean Connery.” Reeves, who is famously polite and good-hearted, told the Fangs that he was “really flattered.”

“We took a picture that day and that picture sits on the wall at the restaurant,” Fang said, happily. “But the story is that nobody there knows any of the famous people who go in.” As a born and raised Californian, she would know all the celebrities, she added, but she’s always busy, running her own restaurant, Fang, in the SoMa business district, which is about a 20-minute walk away. Fang and Reeves recreated the photo 29 years later, as shown by the House of Nanking’s Instagram.

Kathy Fang is a busy businesswoman. Besides running her Fang restaurant and releasing a cookbook, she is a Food Network star as a two-time Chopped champion and a cast member of “Chef Dynasty: House of Fang.” San Francisco Magazine even crowned her as a “culinary queen,” and she’s the mother of two children with her husband who, she notes, doesn’t even like Chinese food. She talked to Fortune about how she disappointed her parents by failing to become a doctor or lawyer—and finally found out how proud they were of her through her reality TV side hustle.

A calling to a crowded kitchen

Like many immigrants to the U.S. (the Fangs moved to San Francisco from the Shanghai area), the Fangs pushed Kathy toward a stable, prestigious future.

“They wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer [or] go into the corporate world,” she said. She dutifully followed this path to the University of Southern California as a pre-med student, only to discover that, while she had no fear of cooking oil in a giant wok, she had no stomach for medicine.

“I realized I was terrified of needles, like irked by hospitals,” she said. “That would be a problem. Yeah, I still to this day cannot see a needle go into an arm.”

She subsequently landed in the corporate world, working at Fortune 100 company Johnson & Johnson and Wall Street stalwart Merrill Lynch. But the corporate environment left her feeling uninspired. When she finally called her father to announce she was quitting her job to return to the family restaurant, he was befuddled and upset. “He’s like, ‘Why, did you get fired or something?’” Kathy recalled, and she responded: “No, I just really don’t like what I’m doing and I love food, I love cooking and I like miss that kind of environment.”

The environment she missed is one of organized chaos and high-pressure efficiency. While she declined to disclose financials, and acknowledged Fang had struggled more during the pandemic (as many restaurants did), she acknowledged her family’s restaurant is a “cash cow” that has served an estimated 5 million to 6 million people over its 38 years in business, quite a feat considering the tiny footprint.

“That’s tough when you think about how big the restaurant was when they first got started,” she said, noting it could only seat 30 to 40 people for its first decade in business. “And the kitchen can only fit about two to three people.” It’s since doubled the size of its dining room, but “the kitchen hasn’t changed at all. It’s just kind of wild.”

A business career to be proud of

Kathy’s return marked a turning point for the brand. While Peter Fang had built the restaurant’s reputation through culinary ingenuity, the family was media-shy, unlike their telegenic, media-savvy daughter. She said she was approached to try food television, and she sees it as something that allowed her to share her family’s story.

“I felt like I was kind of helping build this brand that my parents already built,” she said. “Everybody knows House of Nanking, but they’d never done anything with it. They’d never done any marketing, never done any PR around it.”

Her involvement proved to her father the business could be multigenerational, easing his fears the restaurant would die when he could no longer work.

“My dad now knows that this is something that can continue down generations,” Kathy notes, adding he even looks at his 8-year-old granddaughter as a potential future successor.

Fang said strangers and customers at the restaurant have come up to her and said, “your dad’s so proud of you,” and about three years ago, she recalled, during filming for the Chef Dynasty show, her dad said during a green-room recap interview, “I’m just very proud.” But she’s never heard it directly from him. “My dad will never tell me, and that’s a very Chinese thing, they just, they’ll never compliment you to your face.”

The restaurateur shared that one of her big jobs now is managing her parents’ workload. Now in their mid-70s, they still both work the lunch and dinner shifts every single day. The thing is, Fang noted, the 18-month hiatus during the pandemic revealed that retirement might not be an option; during the lockdown, Kathy’s mother, restaurant co-founder Lily, developed health issues from no longer being on her feet all day, and her father actually went totally silent.

“My dad lost his voice because he was using it every day that the vocal cords became weak,” Kathy said. “It’s like wild… As soon as he got back to work and started using his voice again, it came back.”

She said there’s no plan for them to slow down anytime soon. “They like the routine. Staying at home is not good for them. They also, because they work every day, have never developed any hobbies or made any friends,” she said with a laugh.

There aren’t plans to further expand, either. Kathy said she respects her father’s wish to keep the business small and Chinatown-bound, waving off talk of any kind of nationwide expansion.

“I’m not going to do it if my dad doesn’t want to,” she said. “It would kind of lose that essence and soul to it.”