Joyce Chen

At 76 years old, Joyce Chen physical status not available right now. We will update Joyce Chen's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Following the 1958 opening of her first restaurant, Chen began teaching Chinese cooking at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and the Boston Center for Adult Education in 1960. There were long waiting lists for her classes. At this time, she introduced many Americans to home style and gourmet Chinese cooking techniques.

In 1962, Chen published her influential cookbook, the Joyce Chen Cook Book. Publishers had balked at her insistence on color pictures of food, so she had the book published privately at her own expense. She pre-sold over 6,000 copies of her book at her restaurants before the book was printed. Eventually a publisher became interested, and sold an additional 70,000 copies, and still more in later reprintings over the years. Boston cardiologist Paul Dudley White wrote the foreword to her book, and praised her use of healthier ingredients. MSG was popular at the time, and was included in most of the recipes.

In 1967, Chen starred in her own cooking show called Joyce Chen Cooks, on National Educational Television (NET), now the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Twenty-six episodes were filmed on the same set as The French Chef (featuring Julia Child) in the studios of WGBH in Boston. The two programs were both produced by Ruth Lockwood, and the basic studio kitchen setup was superficially redecorated in an "oriental" motif.

Julia Child had already been a regular visitor at Chen's restaurant, and a fan of her cooking.

Chen's cooking show aired widely across the US, and eventually in the United Kingdom and Australia; eleven of these original programs can still be seen on the WGBH website. Chen was not a rigid purist, sometimes discussing what kinds of readily-available American ingredients could be substituted for hard-to-find Chinese ingredients. She would later be criticized for adapting and simplifying recipes for American tastes, although she pioneered in an era when few viewers had access to authentic Chinese ingredients and flavors. Her recipes were many American viewers' first glimpse at the making of Chinese food, beyond such Americanized dishes as chop suey and chow mein. She also introduced some novel kitchen tools to American audiences, including the wok and the Chinese chef's knife, often misidentified as a "Chinese cleaver".

Chen lacked the informal, casual English-language fluency of Julia Child, and spent hours with voice coaches carefully trying to improve her pronunciation. Her programs gained a modest following among viewers, and Reader’s Digest gave her an award for educational television. However, the pilot season failed to gain a funding sponsor, and was discontinued after its initial run of 26 episodes. Later critics pointed out that she was one of the few non-white television cooking show hosts to have any American national distribution before the 1980s. After the end of the season, the show was re-run intermittently until 1976.

In 1971, Chen launched Joyce Chen Products, a line of higher quality Chinese cooking utensils. At that time she helped popularize Chinese cookware, and held the design patent (USD221397S) to a flat bottom wok with a handle, also known as a stir fry pan, which she called a "Peking Wok". She also introduced polyethylene cutting boards, made in Japan by Sumitomo Bakelite. In 1982, Joyce Chen Specialty Foods would be formed to sell bottled sauces and other flavorings.

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