The World of Woon

First off, the food at Woon Kitchen in LA’s Eastside is incredible. It’s homestyle Chinese food, which is still clean and healthy, and uses only local and seasonal ingredients. Behind the restaurant is Keegan Fong (and his mother, Julie Chen), a Californian, raised entrepreneur who’s organically developing the kitchen into a lifestyle brand – using his band of creative pals to create products and ideas which are on par with the quality of the food. What’s next in the future world of Woon?

You’re a Californian native. Can you tell me a little about your family heritage and growing up in CA

I grew up in the Pasadena area in a small town called San Marino, where I lived with my mom and sister. It’s a very conservative, affluent neighborhood, which slowly became very Chinese-dominated (later people started calling it Chan Marino) because of the top-level public schools. I probably lived in the smallest house in town, but it was fun growing up in such a safe bubble where I could just skate to friend’s houses any time of day and not have to worry. My mom was originally born in Shanghai, grew up in Hong Kong, and moved with her family to Woodland Hills when she was a teenager – so she’s been a Valley girl all her life. My dad’s family migrated to Boston from Hong Kong as well. He went to LMU then MIT to be closer to family, and he eventually made it back to LA where he still resides now.

I know you’re big into camping and discovering the great outdoors, so maybe you can give me a few tips in terms of the best experiences you’ve had?

Ha-ha… yeah, I just love being able to get away in nature as much as time allows me. Just the feeling of not having to deal with people and city life is pretty freeing. I used to have an old church van, 1990 Ford E350 Club Wagon XL it said “FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF SAN BRUNO” on the side of it in huge letters. It was the old tour van of the band, Vetiver, and then got passed down to a mutual friend in San Francisco who eventually sold it to me. It was converted at the back so it had a nice bed and a little kitchen counter. It also had a row of seats with seat belts so it was extra long. When “Bruno” was running nicely, I’d take that thing camping everywhere. It was also the original Woon van which we transported our Woon cart in for all our first events. We’d cram my mom, brother-in-law and my business partner Michael in it, and just charge around LA. People probably thought we were some crazy family hoarding stuff in the back. I just sold it last month to another friend :(

I’d have to say my most memorable camping experiences have always been in Big Sur or Catalina Island. I think it’s the fact that both those places are by the coast and you have access to the ocean, and can still explore the land. Some of my favorite camp adventure stories are definitely from both those places. I’ve camped plenty out in Joshua Tree which is fun also, but it’s nothing like being by the ocean.

“When ‘Bruno’ was running nice, I’d take that thing camping everywhere. It was also the original Woon van which we transported our Woon cart in for all our first events. We’d cram my mom, brother-in-law and business partner Michael in it, and just charge around LA.”

Before Woon Kitchen you worked at Vissla correct?

Yeah, so I was one of the first employees at Vissla (it didn’t have a name or a logo when I was first hired). It was pretty much the VP of marketing – my buddy Corban (who became the team manager) – and myself building the brand and its story from scratch. I ran the marketing strategy, content creation and digital marketing. We created this brand and launched it in about 3 months, which was unheard of. Being able to experience building a successful brand from the ground up on someone else’s dime was an invaluable experience that I’ll never forget. I was there for 5 years until I decided to move on and open Woon.

When did the brainwave for Woon Kitchen occur? How did you get started?

So in 2013, my uncle and cousin (JF Chen Antiques) were hosting and curating an annual art fair called ‘Parachute Market’. My cousin was looking for food vendors and had only booked what was the first iteration of Guerrilla Tacos of the time. I told her and my uncle if they gave me 30 days I could come up with a business plan and be one of the food vendors at the event. They took a chance and gave me the green light. So in 30 days I gathered my family and we essentially built a pop-up business from scratch. I came up with the name Woon (which means ‘bowl’ in Cantonese), My sister was a fashion designer so she created the logo and got aprons made with logos embroidered, my brother-in-law (who’s from Austria) had some kitchen experience so we worked on operations and he learned how to use a wok, and of course, my mom was the chef so I worked with her on recipes. I asked my buddy, Peter Wilday, to build a cart which we used as the front counter and we would end up wheeling around to every event. We did one walk-through and hosted a pop-up at our friends’ studio called Pico Studio in Koreatown. We pretty much set our cart up in an alleyway with a makeshift kitchen behind it and all our friends came with booze while our other friend DJ’d. This ended up being the first of many pop-ups at Pico Studio. As for Parachute Market, we ended up selling out in 3 hours the first day and selling out again the next day, from then on we just got asked to do a bunch of events and hosted our own pop-ups at different venues around LA. Keep in mind my entire family was working full time, so we were only doing events on weekends where we were all available. I would drive up from San Diego, where I was living at the time, and spend all weekend prepping, setting up the events, cooking in a wok and cleaning dishes the next day.

Everything on the menu is your mother’s recipes from your childhood correct? Can you tell me a little bit about this style of cooking?

Yes, 90% of the menu is everything I grew up eating or some iteration of it. She was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, so a majority of it is a mix of Shanghainese / Cantonese. My grandma became infatuated with American junk food and TV dinners when she moved to the US so my mom taught herself how to cook Chinese food. The noodles are the main show at Woon and those are the noodles my mom made for us as children. Same with the fishcakes, veggie wraps, pork belly, wings, and salads on the menu this is all stuff my sister and I consider comfort food. She’s definitely a home cook, so none of it is what most would think as very “traditional”, but it’s all tweaked by my mom one way or another. A good example is the fishcakes. Most Cantonese restaurants have something similar where they stuff ground pork inside a fried tofu cube and they steam it. However, my mom tried it with fish paste and decided to fry it because she knew we’d like the crispiness better than a steamed version as kids.

Is Mama Fong still active in the kitchen and updating the menu?

Until COVID, my mom was in the kitchen at Woon daily overseeing everything. I couldn’t get her to go home if I tried. Now she’s obviously locked down at home, but she’s still cooking a bunch of specials for us that you’ll see from time-to-time. It’s keeping her busy at home and it’s nice for us to get a taste of all the other things she can cook. She’s still very protective of her recipes and checking in with me daily!

“The noodles are the main show at Woon and those are the noodles my mom made for us as children. Same with the fishcakes, veggie wraps, pork belly, wings, and salads on the menu – this is all stuff my sister and I consider comfort food.”

It’s homestyle Chinese food, but it always seems fresh and clean. Do you only source local produce?

One thing my mom has always disliked is food being too sweet or too salty. Which is really funny because traditional Shanghainese food is defined by sweet and savory. So, my mom always chose to have a lighter hand when it came to seasoning which makes it a bit cleaner to begin with. As for ingredients she was always self-taught, so she always erred on the side of quality rather than price growing up. We use a Shanghai Ching gong green choy rather than a bok choy, we use flank steak rather than a loin cut. We are really lucky to have found Chinese distributors who only deal with Chinese restaurants and ingredients. They deliver to us daily which is such a benefit because this means our produce is fresh daily. We don’t have to store it for days at a time. All the produce is sourced locally in California by farmers who specialize in Asian produce. We have now switched our pork belly to Pead’s and Barnett’s, the best local pig vendor there is.

And you’re one of a few restaurants partnering with a local charity right?

The Lee Initiative was started by Chef Edward Lee and Lindsey of Cacek. When COVID first hit, they raised money with the help of Maker’s Mark to pay restaurants to provide meals for restaurant industry workers who were out of work. Now in the second phase, they are providing grants to local farms who are in turn providing produce and meat to local restaurants – one of them being us! There’s only 4 of us right now: Mozzaplex, Providence, Sqirl and Woon. We are so fortunate to be a part of this right now.

Woon Kitchen seems to be expanding into a pretty cool lifestyle store as well, I know the merchandise is always selling out fast. Was that the plan from the offset? Do you have other verticals in mind?

Thanks, I appreciate it. Right now I feel like I’m very behind on the merchandise side of it. I’ve had to focus a lot of my attention on the kitchen and everything else has just happened organically / when I have time. I’d really like to focus more attention on the lifestyle side of it because I feel like there’s a lot more potential there and it’s what’s fun for me. I’d hope to be able to design more things and create some type of lifestyle shop out of it. I think the restaurant can’t live without that side of it, and the lifestyle / merch can’t live without the restaurant side of it. So I think naturally, they will both always exist. Right now I’m pretty much through all our existing merch, so I’m planning up some new designs right now :)

What about this great shirt you’re wearing? Is it going into production? I want one!

Our uniforms are beautifully made by my friend Zephyr who lives in Bali and owns an ethically focused factory out there. She has a private label brand called Last Layer, and we collaborated on some screen printed uniforms using her existing workwear silhouettes. The giant Chinese character printed on the back is the character for “Woon” or “bowl” in Cantonese.

Future dreams for Woon Kitchen? Or maybe a new venture?

The ultimate dream would be to open some offshoots of Woon in LA and/or elsewhere. I’ve got ideas for plenty of other concepts which I hope can happen within the next few years. Also, as we build our little Homestyle Goods / private label products, I hope to expand that more into a lifestyle vertical at some point, but that takes a lot of time and patience, so I’ll let that one bloom slowly.