At a new restaurant, Peter Chang cedes the stage to 'a better cook': His wife
From left: Lydia Chang, Lydia Chang and Ronger Wang. By David Hagedorn May 7 at 8:00 AM It’s the day after Lunar New Year, and even though it’s early February, the balcony door in chefs Lisa and Peter Chang’s modern Bethesda apartment is wide open. Lisa eyes the smoke alarm as pork riblets sear in one saute pan and chiles hit the shimmering oil in another.
The flurry of activity continues. Lisa, 58, dishes up soy-braised beef with tiny whole potatoes and tops rice noodles with pickled long beans, pickled mustard greens and chile oil. Then she scrambles eggs and tosses them with sauteed tomatoes, Maggi Seasoning and scallions to crown longevity noodles and stir-fries smoked pork belly, smoked tofu, green peppers and Chinese leeks.
Chef Peter Chang, right, and his mother, Ronger Wang. In 2011, Peter teamed up with business partner Gen Lee and started opening restaurants of his own. Under the terms of their negotiated status, Peter and Lisa can live and work in the United States, but if they leave the country, they can’t return. And the business must be in Lydia’s name. She obtained a green card in 2014 and intends to apply for citizenship in December.
Lisa and Peter Chang, rear, with Lisa’s mother and their daughter, Lydia, in 1988. It was unusual for women to work in professional kitchens. “You’d see a few here and there in the pastry department,” Lisa says. “Another master would tell my master, ‘Don’t teach her because she’ll be having kids in five years and will leave.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here for the rest of my life. I’ll just prove you wrong with my actions. Words don’t mean anything.
Walking away from the embassy was heart-wrenching, but they wanted to give their daughter a better life than they had in China, and they saw opportunity. The Chinese restaurants they visited in Washington weren’t very good. Monthly visits from his father, an itinerant medical practitioner, were Peter’s happiest childhood memories. “He’d come home with a kilogram of pork. My mom had to cook it in a porcelain pot buried in the cinders to keep the fragrance from getting out so the neighbors wouldn’t know we had meat in the house. She’d wake us up in the middle of the night, and we’d eat it all. No scallions or peppers or soy sauce added to it. I remember that pure pork flavor.
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