Living with her grandma in China until she was 14, Lydia Chang fell in love with the comfort food of her childhood, that feeling of coming home from school and enjoying leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.
Each meal — lovingly cooked with no particular recipe, inspiration derived from a kitchen full of ingredients and the ability to pull them together to create bold, flavorful dishes — is what Lydia and her family strive to share with the community through Mama Chang, a new restaurant in Colmar at the former Golden City on Bethlehem Pike.
The opening is the latest venture by Lydia’s father Chef Peter Chang, a James Beard Foundation Award finalist who’s established himself as a strong force in the D.C. dining scene and beyond with 18 restaurants, including Chang Chang, which appears in the Michelin Guide.
The Colmar opening is the second of two restaurants he’s introduced to the Philadelphia area, following closely behind the June opening of Peter Chang in King of Prussia.
The Mama Chang concept, which has one other location in Fairfax, Virginia, was a chance for the restaurant group to tap into tradition, values and heritage through a menu that invokes memories of the Chang family’s own home-cooked meals.
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“The homemade cooking is really near and dear to our hearts,” she said of the Hunan, Hubei, and Sichuan dishes that have been passed down for generations.
On Oct. 10, a grand opening of Mama Chang’s was marked by a free community gathering inside the 280-seat restaurant, where the Chang family provided a taste of the menu and presented a dining experience inspired by Lydia’s 84-year-old grandmother, Ronger Wang.
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“Her spirit is the reason this restaurant exists. And it’s why we carry her name, her cooking and her values into everything we do,” Lydia said during the celebration.
“We’re here to serve this community, not only with flavorful homestyle Chinese cooking, but with open arms. We want Mama Chang to be a place where stories are shared, friendships are made and memories are created for years to come.”
Who is Chef Peter Chang?
As Peter Chang stood next to his mother and daughter inside his new Colmar restaurant, the renowned chef carried a modest smile etched with a kind of sincere gratitude one might not expect from someone so highly regarded in his craft.
But despite all this restauranteur has achieved, the road to success had not been an easy one.
When asked how Chef Chang continues to stay rooted to his values with each new restaurant, Lydia described a journey that took her father from a rural town in Wuhan across more than 7,500 miles to Washington, D.C. where he worked as a chef at the Chinese ambassador’s residence.
But as his contract came to close, he feared his family’s time living in the U.S. would also end.
Without a driver’s license, proper documentation or the knowledge necessary to pursue citizenship, Lydia said they spent the next several years moving from city to city, as her father quietly cooked in the back of various restaurants along the way.
“He didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. There was a lot of fear. He couldn’t use his real name, and he didn’t stay at one restaurant for more than a year,” she said.
In 2009, he began the two-year process of obtaining his permanent residency, which allowed him to open his first restaurant in Charlottesville in 2011 and create a menu that fully embraced the bold flavors of authentic Chinese cooking he knew back home.
That immigrant experience, she said, has stayed with her family, keeping them humble and connected to their past, even as the Peter Chang brand continued to grow and assert its presence in an ever-competitive restaurant industry.
“We feel like in being immigrants, it’s who we are, it’s what the company is built on, and it will stay with us,” Lydia said.
“I realized how sharing someone’s unique experience was able to make an impact, not only in bringing back my own memories, but also the memories for a lot of our audience in the Asian community, too.”
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What is on the menu at Mama Chang in Colmar?
Unlike the culinary artistry Chef Chang is known for at many of his other restaurants, Mama Chang delivers simple yet flavorful, traditional Chinese cuisine reminiscent of the dishes his family enjoys around their own kitchen.
“We will showcase dishes from China’s central Hubei province that my grandmother would cook at home for our family, and also the savory cooking of my mom, Lisa, who is an accomplished chef in her own right. You don’t see these types of menu items very often in the U.S. Dining at Mama Chang’s is meant to feel like one is dining at a multigenerational Chinese family table,” Lydia said.
Here are a few favorites on Mama Chang's menu:
Go: 118 Bethlehem Pike, Colmar; mamachangphiladelphia.com
Reporter Michele Haddon covers local news, small business, food and drink, economic revitalization, art and culture for The Intelligencer and Bucks County Courier Times at PhillyBurbs.com. Please consider supporting local journalism with a subscription.