Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown, cookbook by Brandon Jew, chef-owner of the San Francisco restaurant, and the woman who inspired it

For Chinese-American chef Brandon Jew, it was the death of his beloved grandmother, Ying Ying, that led him away from Western fine dining and back to his roots.“I didn’t understand that I had to open Mister Jiu’s until Ying Ying – our name for our paternal grandmother in Toisanese – was diagnosed with cancer,” he writes in the introduction to Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown – Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food (2021), which he co-wrote with Tienlon Ho. “She was, at…