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Cecilia Chiang, the trailblazing chef who brought real Chinese food to the US, dies at 100
Oct 30, 2020
SAN FRANCISCO / CNN — The chef who blazed a trail for Chinese cuisine in the United States died Wednesday at 100-years-old. Her granddaughter, Siena Chiang, confirmed her death.
She said her grandmother died in her sleep early Wednesday morning at home in San Francisco surrounded by her family. Exact details of her death are being kept private at Chiang’s request.
Chiang was the owner, chef and mastermind behind the game-changing San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin. She is widely credited with bringing real Chinese food to America and was a celebrity chef before celebrity chefs were popularized.
“I will miss learning from her century of stories, which were endlessly entertaining and incredibly wise,” Siena Chiang said.
The road to San Francisco
Chiang was born to an upper-class Chinese family near Shanghai. Her husband was a diplomat in Japan. Although she wasn’t shy about acknowledging her good fortune, she faced other, more hard-won obstacles.
Convincing the dining public that Chinese food didn’t have to be Thursday’s cheap take-out option, Chiang, who moved to the Bay Area in 1959, had her work cut out for her.
“Most ABC, American-born Chinese, even they didn’t know [about Chinese food],” Chiang explained in an interview with CNN Travel in 2018. Never having been to China, this group also needed to be educated on the difference.
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