He was just 26 years old when he opened Chef Chu’s. His wife — girlfriend at the time — was only 20.

“I told her ‘I have a dream. I want to open a fast food Chinese joint in every corner of America. That sounds so terrific.’”

She disagreed. She said, he recalled, that if he found one good location, and opened one restaurant, she would join him. He said he’s followed her advice ever since.

But why open a restaurant?

“I liked to eat. I liked to talk. I liked cooking things. Making things a little different. And I liked to be the boss. I liked running things,” he said, which was evident in the large kitchen. The scene was fast-paced but very controlled, with 17 cooks prepping food, each at a different station: chopping vegetables, working the fryer, making soup. The cooks assigned to stir fry with huge woks had tidy prep stations at waist height, filled with ingredients from fresh ginger to chili paste.

Just before the waiters carried the dishes — Mongolian beef, Kung Pau tofu, chicken salad — into the dining room, Chef Chu gave them a once-over. On one plate, he adjusted a chili pepper so the plate looked exactly how he wanted it to.

Chef Chu stepped away from the kitchen to do something he’s known for: taking a turn around the dining room, stopping to talk with customers. He asked each how their meals were, what they were eating and thanked them for coming.

One set of customers even told me that they were here on the day Chef Chu’s opened.

Except for the location, the restaurant didn’t look anything like Chef Chu’s does today. Chu said he started with just twelve items.

Larry Chu, son of owner Lawrence Chu, sets a table at Chef Chu’s in Los Altos on December 11, 2025. (Tam Vu/KQED)

His oldest son, Larry, and the restaurant’s general manager, was born in 1973, a few years after the restaurant opened.

“All these customers come in and say, ‘Oh yeah, you were sitting in a baby bassinet, underneath the air conditioner, which was dripping, while your dad was stir-frying and your mom was doing everything in the front: cashier, waitress, take-out,’” he remembered.

They were in a small space at the intersection of El Camino Real and San Antonio Road in Los Altos, in a strip mall shared with a hairdresser, a sewing machine and vacuum repair shop and accounting offices.

“It was a small Chinese takeout place with one door and a countertop, like at a diner, and you could sit at the counter, maybe five stools,” Larry recalled. “You could look right into the kitchen where they were stir-frying. ”

At first, everything looked like it was going great, the elder Chu said. But after six months, business was down. When they asked customers, they heard that they wanted more choices, and a dining room where their kids could throw rice and be messy. Chef Chu’s had to expand. When the sewing repair shop’s lease was up, they opened a dining room there, and kept growing until they bought the whole building complex.

They also expanded the menu. To appeal to a wider customer base, Chef Chu started making food from four different regions of China.

Left: The original Chef Chu’s, next door to the current location at the intersection of El Camino Real and San Antonio Road in Los Altos. Right: A family portrait of the Chus. Chu said his mother wanted the family to be the “Asian Kennedys.” (Jon M. Chu)

And the family also grew — to five children.

“We pretty much lived here,” said Larry. “If we wanted to see my dad, we had to come to Chef Chu’s.”

The restaurant grew in parallel with the community around it. Larry remembers this area — which is totally developed now — looking really different.

“This area here in Los Altos was known for their apricot orchards. So, a lot of the houses of my friends that I grew up with — they had apricot trees growing in their backyards.”

I remembered this, too, growing up in Cupertino, but 16-year-old Will hasn’t ever seen an orchard in Santa Clara County.

In the 1970s, the term “Silicon Valley” wasn’t popular — yet.

“I had a number of friends whose parents had companies that were building these chips that were going into these computers,” Larry said.

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Chef Chu’s, the Family-Owned Chinese Restaurant that Grew Up With Silicon Valley