FROM THE HEAD CHEF

Cooking is not just my job; it is and has been my life. I was born in Taiwan to parents who had been raised around Chinese cooking. My grandfather, who moved with my family to Incheon, Korea opened the first Pyng-Ho Chinese restaurant there almost 70 years ago. This restaurant seat approximately tweleve hundred people and in this enormous restaurant I learned the finer things about Chinese cuisine. After leaving Korea, my parents and I moved to Costa Rica. After almost two years working there, I left to go to America to study. I landed in San Francisco and studied there for ten months before finding my way to Atlanta where I soon saw a perfect opportunity. In a shop in Decatur my career took off.

I found out that cooking Chinese food was what I wanted to do. On the 26th of December 1979, Pyng Ho opened its doors. For the past forty years, I have tried to provide quality Chinese cuisine for the Decatur area. I have been fortunate enough to have lived in four different countries, and I believe this has benefited my cooking by allowing me to create new recipes and expand previous cuisine boundaries. I am also one of the youngest head chefs to cook the traditional Chinese New Year feast for the Chinese community. I still like to keep my edge, so every other year since coming to America I have gone back to China and Taiwan about Chinese cooking in order to constantly learn more. Pyng Ho has become a popular restaurant in this area, and we hope to keep it that way. Even after all of these years, I still have the same passion for cooking as I did 40 years ago.

Steve Jou