Dennis Wong’s parents never wanted him to go into the restaurant industry. Despite the fact that restaurants were in his blood. Despite the fact that his parents, Neil and Poya (along with his aunt and uncle, Ben and Mae), opened Rochester’s Wong’s Café in 1952.
Despite the fact that Dennis literally grew up in Wong’s kitchen—falling asleep on bags of rice while his family worked around him. “The restaurant provided a living for my parents so their kids could get an education and go on and do something else,” says Dennis. “They didn’t want us to continue in the family business—because they knew how much work it was.
They knew the risk involved.” Meanwhile, in the Twin Cities, Dennis’ future wife, Lynn, was experiencing a similar situation. By the time she was nine years old, Lynn was taking the city bus to help at the family restaurant on weekends.
Her older sister and brother-in-law, Helen and David Fong, owned Fong’s Chow Mein in Bloomington. And so it was that Dennis and Lynn’s childhoods reflected each other’s—growing up in restaurant kitchens, cleaning vegetables, bagging noodles, chopping onions and celery. ADVERTISEMENT “When we were younger, hanging out at the restaurant was literally in place of daycare,” says Dennis.
“That was the life around us, so we didn’t think that it was out of the ordinary. But it wasn’t something we’d planned to go into.” And yet, I’m interviewing the couple at the end of more than 40 years a.
