ENTREPRENEURS: Fortune’s Cookie

John Kenneth Galbraith, not one to fawn over anybody, effuses that she “combines scholarship and political sense with damn good food.” Former Harvard President Nathan Pusey calls her place “not merely a restaurant, but a cultural exchange center.” Danny Kaye trades recipes with her. Dr. Paul Dudley White, the heart specialist, wrote the introduction to her cookbook. To the cerebral celebrities and hungry students of Cambridge, Mass., Joyce Chen, proprietor of a Cambridge restaurant that bears her name, is the Chinese Julia Child. In fact, when Child dines out, she is likely to be found munching pressed duck at Joyce Chen’s.

The wizard of the wok is an entrepreneuse of major proportions. Her 400-seat restaurant overlooking the Charles River grosses $1,000,000 a year; a second Joyce Chen’s will open next month, also in Cambridge. She distributes her own line of Chinese cookware, retailed through such outlets as New York City’s Abercrombie & Fitch, St. Louis’ Famous-Barr and Boston’s Jordan Marsh. More than 70,000 copies of The Joyce Chen Cook Book have been sold since it first appeared a decade ago. Mrs. Chen performs on her own Julia Child-style television show, which has gone into reruns on as many as 100 stations in the U.S. and Canada. Recently the Chinese government designated her as import agent in the U.S. for some spices, art pieces, chinaware and tea. So far, Joyce Chen’s activities have earned her a personal fortune of more than $1,000,000.

Mrs. Chen’s import franchise fell into her lap when she got a visa to visit relatives in China last year. Liao Chia-Jeng, a brother who was killed in the Shanghai Rising of 1928, had become a popular Communist hero. When Chinese officials realized that Liao was her brother, they let her travel unescorted throughout the country for two months, asked her to be an adviser to the Chinese Board of Trade and granted her the import concession.

She also brought back dozens of new recipes. Some, like firepot lamb in hot sauce and sliced fish in wine sauce with sweet olive flowers, have already found their way onto her Cambridge menu. Others, like camel’s hump and bear’s paw, will appear as soon as she can find a constant source of supply. “I feel even closer to the Chinese people now than when I left nearly 25 years ago,” she says.

She left China in 1949 with her husband, an importer, and together they opened a restaurant in Cambridge. Since then Mrs. Chen, now 55, has learned to take the sweet with the sour. She divorced her husband in 1966; later he and his new Japanese bride opened a Japanese restaurant not far from the present Joyce Chen’s. In addition, six of Mrs. Chen’s former chefs have left over the years to open restaurants of their own. She does not object to training future competitors. In fact, she is negotiating with the Labor Department to run a job-training project that would teach Americans to become Chinese chefs, using her kitchen as the classroom.