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

For more than ten years, I’ve been traveling all over the state, reporting stories about food and farming from every county in the state. Now, for the 58th and very last story in the series, California Foodways, I went back to where I grew up — Santa Clara County, to a special-occasion restaurant from my childhood: Chef Chu’s.

When the restaurant opened in 1970, it was a small family business, and the area around it was a relatively sleepy suburb. Now, it’s at the heart of Silicon Valley — but they don’t deliver, and there’s no online ordering.

Still, Chef Chu’s is an institution. It’s been visited by luminaries in entertainment, politics and business. Throughout all of the change in the last 55 years, Chef Chu’s has adapted and held on, and remained true to its identity as a family business.

Earlier this year, I met my cousin Billy and his family here — his wife Kimberly, teenagers Will and Guinevere and toddler Imogen. They’re regulars.

Even early on a weeknight, the lobby at Chef Chu’s was bustling. One whole wall is a glass window, looking into the kitchen where 82-year-old Chef Lawrence Chu and his cooks work. At the bar, a staff member took phone orders, and waiters in crisp white shirts and bow ties moved efficiently from room to room.

As we waited for our table we checked out a long wall of celebrity photos including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Chef Chu’s opened the year I was born, and while I went there as a kid, I hadn’t eaten there in decades. For a white girl raised in the suburbs in the ‘70s and ‘80s, this was one of the few Chinese restaurants around. If I didn’t learn to eat with chopsticks at Chef Chu’s, I certainly practiced there, and I have a vague memory of my late grandma teaching me to spin a lazy Susan in the dining room.

That just made it more special when Will, who has heard a lot of my stories in the car with his parents, suggested I do a story on Chef Chu’s. I asked him to co-report it with me, and many of the best questions in our interviews were his.

Neither of us had met the Chef Chu before, in spite of eating there countless times.  We met him in a private dining room where he made us feel comfortable by pouring some tea.

Throughout our time with Lawrence Chu, it was a little hard to see the differences between the man, the job, the restaurant and the brand. He’s been at this a long time.

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.

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.

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.

He saw computers change from monstrosities that filled whole rooms, to desktops.

“Chef Chu saw all of that develop.”

Many Silicon Valley pioneers became Chef Chu’s regulars.

“Mr. Tramiel was the founder of Atari, Chuck Geshke who founded Adobe, Gordon Moore, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs — when he was just a kid — all these people from Silicon Valley ate at Chef Chu’s,” Larry remembered.

Though they were in different businesses, his dad shared a certain approach with some of these customers.

“Silicon Valley people are very quick to adapt to change,” Larry said. “They’re not scared of trying new things. And that’s just part of the community that is around you.”

After college, Larry moved to Hong Kong and worked in sports marketing for years. And the youngest of the kids, Jon Chu, tried his luck as a Hollywood director.

Yeah, Jon M. Chu — the director of Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights and the Wicked movies.

When we reached out to him, Jon was on a world-wide press tour promoting Wicked: For Good, but he sent us some voice memos from Brazil in response to our questions about growing up in Silicon Valley in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“Everywhere I turned, people were thinking of new ways of how to change the world,” Jon told us. “What tomorrow looked like was on everybody’s mind. The engineer was revered. This was before they were on the cover of magazines or drove fancy cars. It was all about work and discovery and invention and innovation there,” he said.

And, like his brother Larry already told us, many of those people converged at the restaurant.

“Sharing stories, sharing space, sharing ideas was such a central part to Chef Chu’s itself. Now going into a fairly selfish business, the entertainment business, I think that that sense of ‘What does tomorrow look like?’ still stays in me in the stories that I tell.”

His family’s dedication and hard work has also stayed with him.

“I saw my dad and my mom work their butts off in the kitchen, out in the front. I saw many sides to it. There was the side that no one saw, which is the grind, the deboning the chicken, getting the deliveries in the back, my grandma doing the books with her abacus,” Jon remembered.

And he saw his parents act as the ultimate hosts: “Being the ambassadors to people who may or may not have ever met a Chinese family, whoever have had or not had Chinese food, introducing them to new flavors.”

There are a lot of similarities between running a restaurant and making a movie, he said.

“Everyone knows the red carpet and when the movie’s out, but they don’t see how hard it is to begin. They don’t know how hard it is in the messy middle. They don’t know the pressures before anyone ever sees it sort of nicely colored and presented.”

Though he can’t visit as often as he likes, Jon said that Chef Chu’s will always be home.

“It’s been the place that I return to to get grounded. It’s a place I return to get fed physically but also emotionally.”

Especially with his five kids in tow. His movie posters are on the walls, but he really likes having customers catch him up on all their family stories.

“There’s a connection point [between] what I’m doing out in Los Angeles or out in the world. The thread pulls all the way back home.”

But there’s a world in which this story could have gone really differently, with Chef Chu’s closing.

In the early 2000s when Jon was trying to get a foothold in Hollywood and Larry was in Hong Kong, their dad was starting to feel the strain of running the restaurant for more than 30 years.

“I was burned out at the time,” said Lawrence Chu.

He had business collaborations, and cookbooks, but the pressure had built up over the years. Plus, his beloved wife, Ruth, had breast cancer. He knew he couldn’t run the restaurant alone forever.

He spoke with Larry about his future plans, a conversation Larry remembers well.

“I could never imagine Los Altos without a Chef Chu’s there. What if when I have kids, I won’t have a Chef Chu’s to bring my kids to and eat? That’s when I decided: “Yes, Dad, I’ll come back and join the family business.’”

That’s how it was meant to be, Jon said.

“We were all very proud to have Larry come back. It felt like the legacy was continuing,” the director said. “There were a lot of hopes and dreams pinned on him. Coming back was like the return of the king, or the return of the prince, is a better way to say it.”

For his father, when Larry joined the restaurant, he gave him a shot in the arm.

“He let me feel that this is a life — the restaurant business — instead of work.”

When he gets tired, he said, Larry reminds him of one of Chef Chu’s own mantras that’s carried him all these years: “Treat every day like opening day,” with the same energy and drive the family felt back in 1970.

As much as Silicon Valley and Chef Chu’s have grown in parallel, Larry explained that he and his dad decided to take a deliberate path away from today’s tech climate of scaling up. They have one location, and no franchises.

“When you walk into a restaurant where the chef comes out and talks to you, you can feel that this restaurant’s got a little soul to it.”

Because their customers keep coming back, Larry said, “that makes us feel like what we’re doing is worthwhile. We didn’t have to scale. Maybe enough is enough. Maybe you could be happy with what you have.”

As our interviews wrapped up, and Will and I were about to leave, he had one more question for Larry: What’s the future of Chef Chu’s?

That’s the question Larry asked himself 20 years ago, and now, he has a very sure answer: “You don’t have to worry about that. When my kids have their kids, there will be a Chef Chu’s here.”