Who

Tong is the restaurateur behind the long-running (if somewhat faded) chain of Shun Lee restaurants. His big claim to fame? He's the man who introduced America to General Tso's chicken.

Backstory

Tong and his family fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949 and settled in Hong Kong. Tong later decamped to the U.S. where he enrolled, rather improbably, at Oklahoma Skate University and earned a B.S. in engineering. After spending a year working at a New York engineering company—which was "just so boring"—Tong jumped to the restaurant biz, teaming up with the famed Chinese chef Ting Tung "T.T." Wang to open Shun Lee Dynasty in 1966. While SL Dynasty is now kaput, Shun Lee Palace (which was renovated by Adam Tihany in 1995) and Shun Lee West have been thriving for decades. Although Tong once worked in the kitchen himself preparing meals, these days, you'll find the reliably genial gent working the front of the house at his two restaurants and occasionally popping on TV do cooking demonstrations. In February 2007, he issued The Shun Lee Cookbook, a collection of easy-to-make Chinese recipes with biographical details sprinkled in between.

Of note

When it debuted, Tong's eatery broke ground on two fronts: It was the first NYC restaurant to give Chinese food the white tablecloth treatment—including head waiters and wine lists—and the first to do Szechuan, Hunanese, and Shanghainese food (as opposed to dime-a-dozen Cantonese food). Similarly, Tong takes credit for importing three now-ubiquitous Chinese dishes to America: orange beef, General Tso's chicken, and Chinese-style soft shell crabs.

Personal

Tong has two daughters and two grandkids and lives on the Upper West Side, where he keeps a collection of rare Chinese recipes and cookbooks.

No joke

Tong estimates that 70 percent of Shun Lee's clientele is Jewish, and he says Shun Lee West's single busiest day of the year is Christmas. (The restaurant is located on the Upper West Side, after all.) Tong says he has been invited to over 500 bar mitzvahs since the 1960s.