Willy Ng worries that younger customers might feel uncomfortable in Koi Palace if they’re unfamiliar with Cantonese cuisine and the Chinese language. But as the years have gone by, both the restaurant’s loyal customers and employees have grown older. More than 25 years later, Koi Palace Daly City is the restaurant group’s oldest property, a place where servers can split a whole fish among a table of eight with just one hand and wok cooks have committed hundreds of off-menu dishes to memory. Willy and Ronny decided to take on an ambitious challenge: opening a traditional Cantonese seafood restaurant that would serve Chinese Americans moving into the Bay Area’s rapidly developing and diversifying suburbs. Then, a property manager offered a space that could house a 450-seat dining room and was easily accessible from I-280. When they sold Happy Valley at the beginning of 1996, Willy thought his time in the restaurant business might be over. The family sold their stake in Wok Shop Cafe in 1990, but the restaurant still stands on Sutter Street.
(To this day, Ronny prefers staying in the kitchen and letting Willy handle any interviews.) The two restaurant concepts mainly offered white clientele a mismatched cuisine Willy Ng describes as “Szechuan, Hunan, chop suey,” although Happy Valley was one of the first restaurants in San Francisco to offer hot pot. Ronny supplied culinary knowledge from his time cooking in Hong Kong, and Willy focused on the front of house and business operations. When brothers Ronny and Willy Ng opened Koi Palace in 1996, the family had already opened Wok Shop Cafe and Happy Valley, which had three locations, in San Francisco. The staff unloads xiao long bao dyed five different colors, and sorts through sauce bases and stocks that will glaze Iberico pork char siu and mapo tofu mixed with plant-based meat at Koi Palace’s newer sibling restaurants, Dragon Beaux, Palette Tea House, and Palette Tea Garden. Then, a delivery arrives from the restaurant’s commissary kitchen. At first, Daly City’s Koi Palace appears unchanged by the last 25 years, a stronghold of traditional Cantonese cuisine. Children clamor over bamboo steamer baskets in the same pagoda-inspired banquet hall where their parents celebrated their wedding years ago.
#Chop suey house skin
A chef waves a suckling pig over a charcoal fire, his wrist turning and twisting until the pig’s skin is evenly browned and perfectly crisp.