Owner of Santa Rosa’s Ting Hau survives as downtown businesses shutter

Sometimes a business has been around for so long that it might feel inconceivable to even consider the idea that it might not be there one day.

Sonoma County staples like Mac’s Deli & Cafe, a breakfast hotspot since the early 1950s; Barnes & Noble, located in the historic Rosenberg’s Department Store, since 1994; Volpi’s Ristorante & Bar, an Italian classic with an actual speakeasy, since 1925; are all businesses that are practically synonymous with their location.

Ting Hau first opened its doors for business in 1999, roughly 10 years after co-owner, Adam Ling, first immigrated to Sonoma County with his family from Wenzhou, China, a seaside town on China’s central coast.

Now in its 24th year and fast approaching a quarter century, Ling expects to work between 10 and 20 more years before retiring, and when he does, Ting Hau will cease to exist.

Ling and his wife, Aihe Fang, don’t believe that to be such a bad thing.

Ling isn’t your prototypical restaurateur, though. In conversation, he’s an engaged, congenial man and quite possibly an amateur humorist above all else. At 50 years old, he hides his age well, spending what little free time he has toying with his cameras and riding his mountain bike through Trione-Annadel State Park.

To this day, he still prepares each meal that is served at the restaurant. It’s a bit different from the position a veteran restaurant owner of his age may expect to find themselves in, but the wok is his office and has been for decades.

From Sonoma to downtown Santa Rosa

In 1989, Ling and his family immigrated to Sonoma County when he was around 16 years old. He immediately began working at his uncle’s restaurant in Sonoma because, well, as he explains it: What else was he going to do?

“I was the first generation when we came here, so we didn’t know what was going on,” he said with a laugh. “So they just put me back in the kitchen so I could start making some money.”

It probably wouldn’t have been his first choice, but being the first generation to arrive in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, effectively limits your options. By joining the family trade, he began learning from the ground, up.

“I learned how to wash dishes first,” he said. “After you learn how to wash dishes, you move on to understand the preparation — the vegetables, how to wash them, clean them, cut them. Then you move to the meat products.”

A simple process, but it’s a methodical approach that’s stuck with Ling ever since. To this day, Ling and Fang still shop for and prepare all the ingredients that he cooks with.

“Chinese restaurants, I think, are pretty much all like this because we don’t have other helpers,” Fang said. “We kind of put all our time in the preparing, the grocery shopping — especially during the pandemic, we had to shop around all different grocery stores to find good quality.”

In his late twenties, after working at a series of other Chinese food restaurants in the area, gleaning information and cooking methods from their owners and head chefs, Ling managed to find a small storefront across from Barnes & Noble on Fourth Street in downtown Santa Rosa. Since 1999, Ting Hau has called it home ever since.

“That was a good time,” Ling said. “It was a good time for the whole economy, 1999, the 2000s … everybody was successful, I didn’t see anybody fail during that stretch of time.”

A couple of decades have passed since those days and Ling attributes the restaurant’s longevity to several factors: agreeable landlords, a small space and a consistency in food quality that guests have come to expect.

“I don’t get my Chinese food anywhere else,” said Daniel Guglielmini, Cotati resident and frequent face at Ting Hau’s takeout counter. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad meal or an unpleasant experience (at Ting Hau), which says a lot.”

The little restaurant that could

Mary’s Pizza Shack, Tex Wasabi’s, Stout Brothers, Portofino, Gerard’s Paella, Bollywood, La Vera Pizza — those are just a handful of restaurants that have come and gone in recent years along the downtown stretch of Santa Rosa’s Fourth Street, yet Ting Hau remains like the little restaurant that could.

“Downtown was different,” Ling said. “Back in 1999, there was not much internet stuff going on, there was a whole lot of people walking downtown. You could not find a parking spot during lunch.”

But times have changed and downtown Santa Rosa hasn’t seen as much physical commerce as it once did, forcing businesses to adapt in order to survive, particularly in a post-pandemic world. Take-out orders remain strong, Fang said, but there’s been a noticeable dip in foot traffic since 2020.

They’ve cut back on the annual family vacations and settled for shorter trips, maybe managed some minor changes like swapping out chicken thigh meat for chicken breast meat to manage inflated product costs, but fortunately for them, not much has needed to be changed.

When it comes to ingredients, some things aren’t worth compromising on. For example, the noodles and wonton dough, or “skin,” won’t change. They have been prepared fresh each week by the same small family business in San Francisco that Ling has used since opening the restaurant.

Most weeks, Ling is clocking in around 70 to 80 hours, something his three children want no part in. They’ll often come to help during busy days, like Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, but it’s never a full-time gig. His son, Jonathan, a sophomore at Maria Carrillo High School, helped out over the holidays.

According to Yelp, a restaurant review website, the market share of Chinese American restaurants has been consistently falling for the last decade while other ethnic foods, such as Vietnamese and Indian foods, have been remaining steady or growing.

Between 2015 and 2020, the share of Chinese American restaurants shrank an average of 7.3% to 6.5% in major metropolitan areas like New York City and San Francisco.

Which comes as no surprise to Ling. With the amount of work required to keep a place like Ting Hau going, he questions why anyone would choose this path.

“My daughter, she works for Boeing,” he says. “She’s a materials scientist – an engineer – working with composite materials… So, why do restaurant work? It’s so much work!”

Providing for their family

Ling and Fang had their first daughter roughly a year before they decided to open Ting Hau. At first, family members were able to babysit while the two worked to get the business up and running. Fang even worked in the restaurant throughout her next two pregnancies.

She explains that they work hard at the restaurant so that they can support their children through college, both financially and through whatever extracurriculars they needed. For their two daughters, that meant four years at UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara, and for their son, they’ll wait to find out when he graduates from high school in a couple of years.

The intention was never to hand the business off to their children, it was always a means to an end, whenever that may be.

In the meantime, however, Ling and Fang will continue to provide the same quality Chinese food that locals have come to know and love until the day they decide that they’ve done enough.

“We’ll just keep doing what we do best,” Ling said. “Since day one — every day, (we will) keep doing it. Never change your style.”

Ling feels at ease with Ting Hau’s success for the near future, and even his neighbor’s, Asef’s Appliance Services.

“As long as the landlords don’t sell the building, I’m in pretty good shape,” Ling said. “And Asef’s — they’re here forever, they’re not going anywhere. (Asef) says to me, ‘I’ve been here so many years, what else am I going to do, after 40 years?’ Same question I ask myself.”

Whatever it is, it’s a far cry from his early years in the muddy streets of Wenzhou, China. The last time he was able to visit, on a family trip in 2018, he couldn’t quite figure out where he was. Another generation had gone by since he last visited and a different world now stood in its place.

“I got lost,” he laughed. “When I grew up (in Wenzhou), it was all rice fields, rivers, dirt roads… So, after thirty years, everything was all torn apart. High rises, roads and cars.”

He thinks for a few more seconds, then smiles.

“The mountains are still there.”