How Peter Chang’s Legendary Restaurants Handle the Christmas Rush

The first and maybe only time I’ve ever truly felt the Christmas spirit was in my second hour of standing outside a restaurant called Q by Peter Chang in Bethesda, Maryland. It was December 25, 2021. I had been prudent, I thought, calling in the order at five, and arriving just after six. But the minute I saw the cars wrapped around the block with hazards flashing, the jam-packed dining room, the throng of masked customers waiting for pickup, and the ocean of bagged to-go orders, I understood that this was going to take a while.

There is a famous saying: two Jews, three opinions. But if there is one ritual on which we have near-universal consensus, it is that we eat Chinese food on Christmas. So over the last century, digging into dim sum on December 25 went from a practicality to a full-blown ritual. When Justice Elena Kagan was going through her confirmation hearings, someone asked what she was doing on Christmas one year. She said, “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” That night, Justice Kagan might have been the only Jew in the DC area who wasn’t at Q. Minutes turned into hours. Every so often, the manager would promise our food would be out in “another 10 minutes.”

I had been sent forth to collect dinner, leaving my parents and wife at home with our two young sons. When my kids’ dinnertime came and went, I should have started to get agitated. But everyone waiting just seemed… happy to be there. It was an unseasonably warm evening, 65 degrees, so most of us were waiting outside, masks off, knit together in an unspoken camaraderie. Soon, rain began sheeting down, but still, we abided, with goodwill towards men.

My food — a giant sack with gong bao chicken, cumin lamb, dry-fried green beans and more — was handed to me at 8 p.m., and I remember being almost sad that my long watch had ended. I’d felt God in that Chinese restaurant that night, the God that has sustained my people and brought us prosperity in this country. Back at home, my family said a little shehecheyanu and dove into the twice-cooked pork.

When I recently met Lydia Chang, Peter’s daughter and CEO of his company, I wanted her to know how much that night had meant to me. “Oh, I remember that night,” she replied. “It was my worst nightmare.”

Peter Chang is indisputably one of the top chefs in America. Born in Hubei, China, he won numerous cooking competitions before coming to the U.S. in 2001 on a contract to cook in the Chinese embassy. A few days before he was set to return to China, he woke up early to cook the ambassador’s breakfast. Then he, Lydia, and his wife, Lisa, walked out of the embassy as if they were going for a walk in the park. Then they vanished.

For years, the family hid from both U.S. immigration and Chinese officials, who resorted to calling family members in China, pressuring the Changs (whose surname is actually Zhang; somewhere along the way, it got transliterated Taiwanese-style and stuck) to return. Peter jobbed furtively around the area, often under a pseudonym. But this was during the early days of the internet, and slowly word began to spread on culinary forums like Chowhound that a genius could be found in the strip malls of Fairfax and Alexandria, Virginia. Whenever he moved, foodies sought him out, culminating in a New Yorker article titled, simply, “Where’s Chang?” by Calvin Trillin in 2010. Overnight, Chang’s life changed — and Zhang Pengliang became “Peter Chang” once and for all.

In the last few years, Chang and his wife have applied for green cards; in the interim, a Virginia judge has deemed them vitally necessary to the state economy, which makes sense, given that his empire now includes 18 restaurants along the Acela Corridor, from Richmond, Virginia to Stamford, Connecticut. Few chefs, even globe-spanning celebrities, can claim as many. Peter himself is in the kitchen at one or another almost every single night (most often, it’s Q or Mama Chang, in Fairfax, Virginia). At this point, the Chang restaurant empire is a well-oiled machine. And every Christmas pushes it to the brink of collapse.

One October evening, Lydia invited me to the capacious kitchen at Q to get a sense of what a normal evening rush looks like. It was unlike any kitchen I’d spent time in before. A crew of four cooks worked the woks on the range. Another two ran the ovens, steamers, and broths. Four other cooks carved ducks, rolled out their signature scallion pancakes (which puff up into a glorious crackling spheroid), and ladled soups. Service that night was busy, but not frantic. The main event was a gigantic 14-course, all-crab banquet for 40 people, field-marshaled and plated by Peter Chang himself. (If you felt a pang of envy reading those words, spare a thought for how I felt watching it all walk past me.)

There was no music in the kitchen, and little banter. If anything, there was remarkably little verbal communication beyond what was strictly required. It felt like watching a basketball team in full flow, moving and executing with practiced swiftness.

I told Lisa Zheng, the general manager, that this felt like a 7 out of 10 on the energy scale. “Yeah,” she said, “but compared to Christmas, it’s a 4.”

Ironically, the Chinese word for Christmas Eve is 平安夜 — “peaceful night.” But in Chinese restaurants across America, December 24 is anything but.

When I ask Chang what he thinks of Christmas, he clutches his head and says the only English word he’s used all night: “Crazy!” (Our interview was conducted in Chinese and my Chinese is rusty enough that I’d later have to get my wife to translate much of the recording.) “I’m scared of the holiday,” he tells me. “It’s very profitable, but it’s too exhausting, too anxious.”

On a normal Saturday night, says Lisa, a Peter Chang restaurant will do 150 or so covers over the course of a three-hour dinner service. On Christmas, their busiest restaurant, Mama Chang, will do 500. On December 24 and 25, Mama Chang and Q, which is the biggest restaurant by square footage, will deploy 18 to 20 cooks, many of whom will start showing up at 6 a.m., and all of whom will work overtime. The sheer scale of the prep work is mind-boggling. One of the things that makes Chang’s restaurants so exceptional is how quickly food comes out of the kitchen. This speed relies entirely on a combination of masterful wok technique, staggering heat, and Chinese restaurants’ notoriously finicky mise en place: Not only must all of the vegetables and aromatics be sliced into specific shapes, but so must all the proteins. This allows wok cooking to happen at maximum warp — a dish may go from pickup to plating in a single minute. “When I watch an accomplished chef stir-frying,” writes Fuschia Dunlop in Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, “I see a magician, a worker of wonders. A chef may be battle-scarred, chain-smoking, inarticulate — and yet the grace of his movements, his extraordinary mental and physical agility, makes me gasp.”

Then there are the hundreds of scallion pancakes that must be rolled into perfect circles; the thousands of dumplings must be precisely twisted; the vats of stock that must be converted to soup. According to Chuck Ye, manager of Mama Chang, the week of Christmas, the prep cooks at each restaurant must finely dice 30 pounds of ginger and 60 pounds of garlic, which is equivalent to approximately 3,600 cloves. I could give you more of a litany of numbers here — how many pounds of pork, how many to-go boxes, how many sacks of rice — but I worry that they would blur into normalcy, like billions of dollars in a defense budget. The point is that none of this is normal, none of it is easy, and none of it should be taken for granted.

Peter’s biggest fear is that Christmas might push the operation to the point where the quality suffers, and Chang is a man for whom quality is non-negotiable. He’s famous for slinging true Sichuan cuisine, like dry-fried eggplant that crackles and dissolves in the mouth like a perfect french fry, or silken tofu in salted egg sauce. His food requires extreme levels of technical mastery, especially for the wok chefs. When I watched Peter prepare a deep-fried “squirrelfish” for the banquet (an item not on the normal menu, to be fair; it’s also known as “pinecone fish”), he began by flour-dredging a fillet that had been expertly cleaved into long filaments, all of which were still attached to the skin. “This knife work is complicated,” he admitted, before lowering the fish into boiling oil, holding the skin over the surface with tongs. In seconds the fish unfurled itself and became hardened yellow coral. On cue, the chef beside him began preparing a vibrant red sweet-and-sour sauce, which he ladled over the fish once it hit the plate. The ovation from the banquet room was audible throughout the restaurant.

Christmas diners might not be able to order the squirrelfish, but they can definitely order the duck, and they do, in numbers that dwarf any high score in Duck Hunt. Chang is famous for his Beijing duck, also known as Peking duck, which takes 24 hours to prepare, between lacquering, chilling, and roasting. Each duck takes one hour to roast in a specialized vapor-injection oven; Q has two such ovens, and each can accommodate 15 ducks at a time. Even for a master chef like Chang, each duck takes five minutes to break down and plate. Historically, during the season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve, Chang told me his restaurants would sell 2,000 ducks. These aren’t just any ducks, either; Chang sources them from specialized farms in Pennsylvania and Long Island. Then came Christmas 2020 — the pandemic year.

“Supply chains were very unstable,” he explained. “At that time, there weren’t enough ducks on the market for what we needed.” He wound up spending the week leading up to Christmas driving alone up and down the I-95 corridor, usually at night, the 900 miles between Stamford, Connecticut and Atlanta, trying desperately to scare up enough ducks to meet the demand.

Since then, that demand has doubled; this year they expect to go through 4,000 ducks. On December 24 and 25 alone, each restaurant, says Lydia, will go through up to 500 per night. Every fridge, including the walk-in, will be full of ducks, and the ovens running nonstop. At Q, Peter takes over an area and hand-carves almost every duck himself.

While many Western restaurants handle major holidays by instituting prix fixe menus, Peter insists on serving the full menu. It would be anathema not to. By 3 p.m., the cooking for takeout orders begins in earnest. Around 5 p.m., the dining room starts to fill with a combination of reservations and walk-ins, and this is where the work starts to blur into indescribability. When I ask Lisa and Lydia to describe what it’s like from 5 to 8 p.m., when orders taper off, they gaze into the middle distance and shake their heads slowly. I’ve worked in enough restaurants to know there’s never time to sit and just vibe, and that 14-hour days are normal. But the reason those days are physically possible is that you learn to go at a sustainable pace. The best way I can describe Christmas is this: I’m an okay swimmer, which is to say, I can swim for half an hour without stopping, as long as I stay in my comfort zone. But if I try to go faster than that, it doesn’t take long before my lungs feel like they’re going to burst.

For Chinese restaurants, Christmas is that feeling for two days straight. Chang’s restaurants don’t even do an evening staff meal, because no one has time to eat one, much less prepare one. If a local pizzeria is open, they’ll order pizza, which people just try to grab a piece of and inhale. The thing that truly fills the team with fear is the takeout orders. The night I observed, one server was tasked with bagging. For Christmas, six servers take over the central table in the kitchen, armed with towers of takeout containers; any plating for dine-in gets relegated to a tiny nook by the pass-through.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re ordering from nationally known restaurants like Chang’s, or neighborhood places: For two days every year, Chinese restaurants have to double their maximum capacity. Ming Chi, manager of Chen’s 22 in Springfield, New Jersey, says that for Christmas, they double every order: “Ten cases of chicken a week becomes 20 cases.” Everyone works overtime, and those two days are “nonstop.” Amanda Tang, manager of the venerable Twin Dragon in Los Angeles, says they do four or five times as much business — and it’s the one day a year they don’t offer duck. Chen’s 22, likewise, takes whole fish and lobster off the menu.

Both Peter and Lydia fantasize about closing for those two days. But it’s simply too much money to say no to. On a normal busy night, their take is $15,000. On Christmas, it’s $50,000. The one thing that gets them through, says Lisa, is that all 18 Chang restaurants compete with one another to see who can bank the most net sales relative to the previous Christmas. By turning Christmas into a team sport, the restaurants can salvage some sense of dignity from the chaos.

What gets me, in the end, is that we would never ask this of, say, French chef Daniel Boulud. The thought of besieging Via Carota or Le Coucou like this is almost offensive. A Chang restaurant is every inch as sophisticated and refined as those places, and for two days every December, we treat it like a takeout joint.

But there is, I’ve been reliably informed, no ethical consumption under capitalism, which is why this year, I will be right back in the queue at Q. And I’m definitely getting one of those ducks. Fortunately, there are ways to make the restaurant workers’ life easier. Lydia says to order a day or two in advance, especially for duck; for takeout orders, Peter says that at the very least, your order should be in by 3 p.m. the day you plan to eat. Wherever you live, make a plan and stick to it. Figure out where you’re going to order, and check online or call a week out to ask whether they take advance orders. And most of all — whether you’re dining in or taking out — tip like it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Samuel Ashworth is the author of the forthcoming novel The Death and Life of August Sweeney, about the rise and fall of a celebrity chef, told through his autopsy. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Rey Lopez is a food, lifestyle, and architectural photographer based in Washington, D.C.