Celebrity chef Kathy Fang dishes on House of Nanking

Chef, restaurant owner, TV celebrity and now cookbook author Kathy Fang is also the daughter of San Francisco chefs and restaurant owners. In 1988 her parents started the legendary House of Nanking on Kearney Street, famed for its long lines and the many celebrities who’ve enjoyed meals there, including Keanu Reeves, Francis Ford Coppola and Gary Oldman.

The restaurant, a legacy business in Chinatown and among America’s favorite Chinese restaurants, was named for a place her grandfather, also a chef, had visited in Shanghai. It is also the name of the new cookbook, reprinted just in time for Lunar New Year, which begins Feb. 17.

“House of Nanking” features more than 100 recipes culled from three generations of Fang family dishes, inspired by the foods of Canton and Shanghai. Part history, part technique, part equipment list and part sourcing manifest, it’s aimed at helping home cooks learn which tools they need to make some of the restaurant’s favorite dishes, like sesame chicken with sweet potato fries, garlic eggplant, and shrimp in Tsingtao beer.

Fang, a two-time “Chopped” champion, star of Food Network’s “Chef Dynasty: House of Fang,” and a regular on national TV cooking demos, is also the granddaughter of restaurant owners, who had a small place on Jackson and Kearney. Despite her being immersed in the culinary world from birth, she sensed it left little room for anything else.

“My parents would leave me in the restaurant while they were working, but when it got too busy, I would go my grandma’s eight-seater and help her out. One of my friends was one store down, and we’d hang out until my grandma closed at 5 p.m. She’d take me to her house and cook dinner, and I would fall asleep and wait for my parents.”

Convinced that restaurants were not for her, Fang chose a different path, pursuing a career in the corporate world at Merrill Lynch and Johnson & Johnson. But it didn’t feed her soul. She kept thinking back to what made her happiest, and that was cooking for her friends in college at USC, making them eggrolls from scratch instead of going to a fast-food joint. After attending Le Cordon Bleu in LA, she returned to San Francisco, knowing that she needed to go back to House of Nanking.

She worried that she would feel all of the anxiety of being deprived of family time, as she had while she worked at the restaurant during middle school and high school. But this time was different.

“I worked there for full year and loved it!!” says Fang. “None of those feelings came back. Instead, it gave me a deeper appreciation for the hours.”

And it fed her desire to embrace the business fully, which led to her and her father opening a new restaurant called Fang in 2009.

“It’s not House of Nanking 2.0,” she says of the father-daughter venture, which boasts a menu that’s 50-50 his and hers. “You can’t make a comparison between the food we serve there and the food at Fang. It’s a natural flow of ying and yang.”

The Food Network’s popular “House of Fang,” which she applauds for capturing the dynamic of the father-daughter relationship, led to the idea of doing the cookbook as a way to further preserve the family history. What she didn’t expect was how much she’d enjoy the process of interviewing her dad and learning more about the forces that shaped his life as well as the lives of his parents.

“Growing up in China, his family faced food shortages,” says Fang. “His best memories are of the one-pot meals his mother made without any fancy ingredients, like her curry chicken soup.”

Her grandmother was always trying to make something interesting out of simple things, including her version of Russian potato salad with cabbage, tomatoes and potatoes. “She added milk to Worchestershire sauce,” recalls Fang. “It was very brothy and meant to eat with rice. In fact, when you eat Shanghai eggrolls, you use Worcestershire.”

Among her favorite recipes are Scallion Oil-Tossed Noodles with Dried Shrimp; the Chinese version of the Italian staple Spaghetti Alio e Olio; and Bastard Eggs with Spicy Ground Pork and Ginger Scallion Sauce, all of which are found in the cookbook.

And what of the next generation? Fang says she recently got her daughter a Miniverse Mini Kitchen for Christmas. “It has a mini kitchen and mini food,” says Fang. “We’ll order from her and she’ll ‘make’ the food: mostly Chinese and Italian food.”

Fang says she’s encouraging her daughter to pursue her own interests, which are currently trending toward being a chef.

“She sees me at the restaurant and in the book and on TV, and it’s so exciting!” says Fang. “Her dad is in the tech space. She can’t figure out what he does. He is sitting at a computer all day, and that’s just not exciting.”

Find the cookbook on Amazon or visit fangkitchen.com to purchase a signed copy.