Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
Monday, June 18, 2018 at 8:57AM 
Published by Henry Holt and Co. on June 19, 2018
At the age of 40, Jimmy is one of the youngest workers at the Duck House, a D.C. restaurant that he and his brother Johnny inherited from their father. Jimmy is known to his staff as “the little leader.” The restaurant manager is Nan, whose plan to spend more time with her son Pat by hiring him a dishwasher has been a disaster. Johnny is teaching a class in Hong Kong, taking a break from the restaurant business, but events force Johnny’s premature return to D.C., where he must listen to his mother’s remonstrations about what a bad son he has been.
Based on a brief internship in a fancy restaurant, Jimmy yearns to prepare gourmet fusion dishes of his own creation, not his father’s Americanized Chinese dishes that are so popular with his customers. Jimmy plans to open a new restaurant with the help of a real estate agent (and new lover) named Janine, an idea that initially had the support of Jimmy’s Uncle Pang, for whom Jimmy used to deal drugs. When Jimmy learns just what kind of shady help Pang has planned, Jimmy has second thoughts. But Pang is not so easily put off, and he soon ignites family turmoil in his scheme to undermine Jimmy.
Number One Chinese Restaurant is very much a family novel; if characters are not related by blood, they have become part of the family by virtue of working for decades at the Duck House. As is common in family novels, marriages are troubled, siblings are at odds, and children are rebellious. Family members form and dissolve alliances, plot against each other, and come together when it counts — unless they don’t.
A good bit of the novel is also a love story involving elderly Duck House waiter Ah-Jack, whose wife has found a younger man, and Nan, whose husband lives in California, and who worries that her friendship with Ah-Jack might jeopardize her friendship with Ah-Jack’s wife. The Ah-Jack love triangle offers the novel’s best insights into how married life evolves over time, how love might endure even if a marriage doesn’t. Some insights are serious and others are not. This is Ah-Jack on the secret of a long marriage: “A strong marriage came when the wedded stopped trying to plumb their partner’s depths. Life became easier when one passed the years with an amiable stranger and not a mirror that reflected back all of one’s flaws.” I put that one in the pile of serious insights, but other readers might disagree.
Finally, as the title implies, Number One Chinese Restaurant is a restaurant novel, one that spends a bit of time in the kitchen, explaining how a well-oiled restaurant prepares meals efficiently and flawlessly, how waiters serve them without crashing into each other, and how owners and managers woo important customers. I don’t spend much time in the kitchen but I like to eat, and I’m a fan of restaurants and of restaurant novels. The nuts-and-bolts of operating a restaurant is a small but essential part of the story.
The combination of geriatric love story, family drama, and restaurant novel is a tough balance, but Lillian Li mixes the elements with light and dark humor, combining sweetness with sadness, love with backbiting, honesty with evil schemes. Li’s light touch makes Number One Chinese Restaurant a fun and easy read, but the story offers serious life lessons as memorable characters make difficult choices and uneasy compromises, confronting problems that are common to every family, whether or not they operate a restaurant.
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