When sisters Jeanette and Joanna Liu took over their parents’ Hakka Chinese restaurant Yueh Tung after their father had a stroke at work, they never expected Joanna to have one herself just two years later in the same kitchen.
The stress was taking a toll on both of them. Despite wanting to continue the legacy of the restaurant their parents had operated since 1986, Yueh Tung was drowning in bills. The pre-pandemic lunch crowds in the downtown core never returned. More international chains with better name recognition moved in. The expectation that Chinatown plates remain cheap and big enough for leftovers, even during an economic downturn, meant the restaurant couldn’t keep up with the monthly $30,000 rent.
“We were like, ‘Is this worth it?” said Jeanette.
“We thought we were going to shut our doors in January after the Christmas season,” said Joanna. “We couldn’t afford renovations.”
Then came a call from the Food Network. The sisters had been selected for “Restaurant Impossible: Last Call,” a new iteration of the long-running restaurant makeover series hosted by restaurateur Jen Agg and “Chopped” judge chef Aarón Sánchez. Joanna and Jeanette weren’t sure the restaurant would survive until filming began in February, but decided to give it one last shot.
Yueh Tung became the series premiere, which aired at the end of July on the streaming platform Citytv+ as well as the Food Network. The first season consists of 13 episodes featuring restaurants across southern Ontario.
“This is my wheelhouse. I love going into restaurants and going, WTF is going on here and all the things that are going right and wrong, it’s something I’m interested in as a diner and restaurant owner…(Yueh Tung) was chosen as the first episode for a reason: the story of these wonderful sisters is so powerful, and I don’t even know the connection with my husband,” said Agg, whose husband and business partner Roland Jean also had a stroke years ago.
Restaurant makeover shows have been television staples for more than two decades, but Agg said today’s restaurant industry bears little resemblance to the one those early series were trying to rescue.
“Some people have this dream of opening a restaurant but don’t realize what goes into it, that’s always been an ongoing thing. But covid, it was just devastating to our industry to a point where I don’t know if most people know how much it impacted the industry, along with costs of labour, goods, tariffs; all that compounded with a business with notoriously tiny margins by the fractions,” said Agg on how the restaurant scene has changed since the first restaurant makeover shows aired. ”People stopped going to restaurants and developed new habits that are hard to break, but within that world there are people who continued to open mediocre restaurants so the competition for the middle market, especially in bigger cities, is crazy.”
Rather than focusing on dramatic confrontations and over-the-top renovations, the changes Agg and Sánchez made to Yueh Tung focused on fixing the restaurant’s underlying economics.
“The biggest lifesaver is decreasing the portions a bit,” said Jeanette. “We’ve always been known as cheap eats and value but that didn’t help us.”
“It was an arms race between Chinese restaurants,” added Joanna. “When our parents ran (Yueh Tung), one place next door would go one dollar less, and then another place went a dollar less. They all closed.”
In the show, Agg stressed more than once that food costs should be around 20 per cent of a dish’s price. The restaurant’s most popular Hakka chili chicken was at 40 per cent, resulting in the restaurant losing thousands of dollars every year.
Sánchez reduced the dish by a few ounces of chicken while telling Joanna and the rest of the cooks to measure out ingredients to reduce food waste, and increased the cost from $22 to $24. A few diners complained about the change when the restaurant reopened earlier this year, though if you were to order the same plate in any non-Chinese downtown restaurant, it would be described as a large sharing plate.
“In the beginning, it really hurt, but what else can we to survive?” said Jeanette. “We were taking hits for the last five, six years and that’s why were were in the hole. We had to make those changes to keep jobs and serve the community.”
There was also no “Extreme Home Makeover”-level change to the dining room (the show only had a $20,000 renovation budget), but sitting at the restaurant now, the space does look brighter. The dingy grey carpet has been replaced with easy-to-clean linoleum, ripped vinyl booths have been replaced, and Chinese-style murals were added to keep the soul of the restaurant.
It’s too soon to determine whether the sisters are fully back on track, but so far there is cautious optimism and a newfound sense of pride among the people who depend on Yueh Tung’s second-generation owners.
“The pile of bills was stacked. Every day the vendors would call and we had to negotiate something, but now we’re able to write a full check without having to worry,” said Jeanette, adding that she’s now sleeping better and Joanna is managing her health. “Our noodle supplier called in the middle of filming. We were a few months late (on payment) and he was like, ‘It’s just a few thousand dollars, I will never stop delivering.’ The relationships that we have with vendors, it’s up to us to make sure we can carry through, because they’re a small business too.”
For now, Yueh Tung’s story continues as Jeanette will be writing a memoir of her family’s restaurant with Joanna adding recipes to each chapter. It is slated for a summer 2028 release.
