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[title]This year, Red Chamber turned 37 and PRON marks 11 years. Anyone in the restaurant game will tell you that this is a herculean feat. Restaurants are difficult things to keep alive, yet for almost four decades Emma Chen has been feeding Joburgers food that tastes unmistakably like her own history.
Red Chamber’s Peking duck is regularly spoken about as the best in the city. The skin comes lacquered and crisp, ready to be folded into a thin pancake with cucumber, spring onion and hoisin sauce.
There are now parents who first ate at Red Chamber in the 1990s returning with their own children. Back then, Johannesburg’s understanding of Chinese food was far narrower than it is today. Ingredients were difficult to find. News of a shipment of fresh tofu would move through the Chinese community, and Chen would make sure some of it found its way into her kitchen. Dim sum, now a familiar part of the city’s weekend eating, was still new to most local diners. Chen was among the people who helped put it on Johannesburg tables.
Her story begins in post-war Taiwan. Chen’s parents came from northern China, their lives reshaped by the Civil War and the Kuomintang retreat to the island. Emma and her sister grew up in a military dependants’ settlement, surrounded by families who had arrived from different parts of China. The cooking reflected that: northern food at home, Taiwanese ingredients outside it, and Sichuan flavours brought into the camps by soldiers and their families.
She initially wanted to join the army, but her eyesight ruled that out. Through a fairly roundabout series of events, she came to South Africa at 22 to study English during a politically complicated period in the relationship between South Africa and Taiwan. Her 2009 memoir, Emperor Can Wait, tells much of this story through food and is essential reading for anyone interested in the way recipes carry culture from one country into another.
In 1989, at 30, Chen borrowed money from family and friends and opened Red Chamber inside a dilapidated jazz club in Rosebank Mews. The restaurant moved to Hyde Park Corner in 1997, where it still operates today. She has watched Johannesburg’s appetite for Chinese food grow from a handful of familiar dishes into something far more curious and informed.
Then, in 2015, came PRON – the People’s Republic of Noodles – in Linden. It’s a more laidback space and closer to the food of Chen’s childhood. My go-to order there is the beef-flank noodle soup. The broth is deep and savoury, the beef is soft, and the handmade noodles still have a proper chew. Add plenty of house chilli sauce and get a small pour of baijiu for the table.
What makes Emma Chen a stalwart is not simply that her restaurants have lasted. It is that Johannesburg eventually caught up with the food she had been cooking all along.
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