When she was 15, Annie Zhang uprooted from China to help her aunt run Peking Restaurant, one of Columbia’s first Chinese restaurants. Two decades later, Zhang is in charge, and she makes sure to keep around the flavors of home.

G.J. McCarthy photos

Above, Peking Restaurant owners Annie and Zhang Yu Ji sit under one of several paintings created by Annie’s father, Ji Dao Zheng, that hang in the business. After moving to the United States, Ji started working in the restaurant, which was then run by his sister-in-law. He eventually assumed control of Peking, one of the first Chinese restaurants in Columbia. Below, Ji Dao Zheng talks with his daughter Annie Zhang during a break March 9 after the lunch rush at Peking Restaurant. Ji put the restaurant in the hands of his daughter when the business moved to its new location in April 2005, about two decades after Annie moved to the United States and began working at Peking.

If there is one thing that Annie Zhang bases her decisions on, it would probably have to be her family. For one, the co-owner of Peking Restaurant gave up her interest in fashion design to carry on her family tradition of running a restaurant.

Zhang’s father, Ji Dao Zheng, who worked at an electrical engineering company in China, decided to move in 1985 to Columbia to help his sister-in-law, Zhao Wing, who ran Peking Restaurant.

Zhang and her sister worked with him at the eatery.

Peking was one of the first Chinese restaurants in Columbia. It opened in 1979 at 122 S. Ninth St., which is now home to Tonic, a bar.

Under the tutelage of his sister-in-law, Ji honed his skills as a chef. Being a chef in China requires extensive training, Zhang said. That’s why the family gave her father their full support when he decided to pursue cooking here. Ji, who has been cooking for the past 20 years, would have become an artist if he weren’t a chef.

Describing her father’s artistic talent as “natural,” Zhang said, “I don’t know how he does it. He just wakes up in the morning, has the picture in his head and paints it out.”

His traditional Chinese paintings and some imported paintings line the restaurant walls.

Soon after moving here, Ji took over the restaurant from Zhao and retained its name.

The biggest barrier Zhang said that her parents faced when they first arrived in Columbia was their inability to speak English. Because of their language barrier, Zhang’s parents decided to take charge of the kitchen and leave running the front to Zhang and student help they hired. Zhang said that she and her younger sister taught their parents how to speak English. Zhang’s younger sister currently works in the food industry in St. Louis.

Zhang and her parents decided to close in 1999 so Zhang could concentrate on raising her son.

G.J. McCarthy photos

Above, waitress Wei Zhang serves Justin Kelly March 16 during dinner at Peking Restaurant in southwest Columbia. Peking has delivered authentic Chinese cuisine to Mid-Missourians for more than 25 years. It moved from downtown to its current location on Green Meadows Road about two years ago. Below, beneath the well-stocked bar at Peking Restaurant are three Chinese-made statues that Zhang says are symbols of prosperity in both business and life.

Six years later, Zhang and her husband, Zhang Yu Ji, decided to reopen the restaurant. It opened again in April 2005, with her father, Ji, still at the kitchen’s helm.

Today, all of Zhang’s staff are Chinese, and she doesn’t want them to have the same communication problems her parents had, so she sends them for English classes in the afternoons before the restaurant opens. Zhang said that speaking English is an important skill in communicating with customers because only about 35 percent are Chinese immigrants and students. Zhang thinks that the Asian food has become increasingly popular in America through the years as people have become well-traveled.

Family and career is not the only balancing act Zhang has had to deal with. She also had to balance between her Chinese roots and Americanized ways. Although she was educated in China during her early childhood, Zhang attended high school and college in Columbia. After attending high school, Zhang returned to China to study Chinese. Referring to her co-workers, she said with a laugh, “To them, I’m too American. To me, they’re too Chinese.”

Zhang had so many responsibilities on her hands, she thought she couldn’t put everything else aside for her college education. When she returned from China for college, she was already in her 20s. That was when she decided to drop out of college. The former hotel and restaurant management major said pointedly, “I didn’t have the time. I got married.”

Zhang’s family also extends to her customers. One of the reasons the restaurant was opened downtown was because they thought customers could walk from work to have lunch.

It was only after she spoke to her customers that she realized that the location was not so ideal after all.

“I realized that I was not the only one who had problems parallel parking,” she said.

Before deciding on the new location, Zhang asked for input from her customers.

“You have to treat customers like family. For some of my American customers, their grandpa comes in, their dad comes in. I even see the fourth generation in here now,” Zhang said. “Because we’ve been in the business for that long, everybody knows everybody.”

Michael Richards, who has been going to the restaurant since it reopened in 2005, said the family environment and what he describes as “the best Chinese food in town” keeps him coming back.

“I like Annie’s personality,” he said. “She knows everyone’s name, what they eat. She remembers everything about you.”

Although she gets along well with her American customers, Zhang hasn’t forgotten her Chinese customers. Zhang has observed that they are very different from their American peers.

“A lot of times when” Chinese “people invite their friends for dinner, they want something that is not on the menu,” Zhang said. “They want something special, something different.”

Her customers usually give her free rein as to what dishes to prepare whenever they organize dinners meetings and parties at her restaurant. If requested, the restaurant will alter dishes to have less salt and sugar.

However, she doesn’t take this freedom for granted. Zhang said she records whatever dishes her customers have to prevent her from preparing the same dishes for them the next time. Chinese customers don’t want to see the same food prepared all the time, added Zhang.

And this is what longtime customer Philip Jen, who organizes most of his business dinners at the restaurant, likes about it.

“Mr. Ji always tries to have something different for me every time I visit the restaurant,” he said.

Zhang said her American customers are different.

“Some of my American customers have been eating broccoli beef for 20 years,” Zhang said. “I ask them, ‘Aren’t you sick and tired of it?’ And they tell me that if they like something, they’ll eat it for a long time.”

Zhang said that for the Chinese customer, the concept of face or what the Chinese refer to as mianzi — which is the social perception of a person’s prestige — is important. Understanding their way of thinking enables her to serve her customers better by knowing what they want, she added. In this case, it means her Chinese customers usually want to impress their guests.

“They feel good when they tell their guests that they’re regulars here and we know them by name,” she said.

Zhang believes in keeping her customers happy by giving them what they want. This belief stems from the advice she received from a Chinese chef while she was in China.

“It was a Chinese saying: ‘If you make one customer happy, you make 30 customers happy. If you make 30 customers happy, you make 60 customers happy,’ ” she said.

Although there is a set menu, Zhang allows her Chinese patrons to make special requests whenever they want a taste of the dishes they miss from their homeland. Zhang said they can order items that are not on the actual menu, such as Chinese traditional Shandong-style dumplings and Chinese hot pot — a soup-based pot that ingredients are cooked in at the table — during winter. In general, Zhang said her Chinese patrons enjoy having Sichuan mala, a Chinese spicy sauce generally served with food in soup or hot pot. Some of her American customers, on the other hand, prefer their food a little sweeter.

Ji also thinks the customer should be treated with respect.

“When you cook, you have to concentrate and do it meticulously … make sure your customers feel at home,” he said. “You can’t cheat your customers. Give them their money’s worth.”

Jen likes the friendly, home-like environment Peking Restaurant offers.

“At Peking restaurant, every customer is treated equally,” he said. “At other Chinese restaurants, my friends and I sometimes feel that they serve us slower than other customers. We feel left out.”

In her effort to maintain a Chinese feel to her restaurant, Zhang travels to the country annually to pick up skills and tips such as how to handle and run the restaurant. She also interviews restaurant owners there on how to make better ingredients to improve her restaurant’s cooking standards.

A traditionalist at heart, Zhang said she wanted the décor of her restaurant to be kept as traditional as possible. The lights in the restaurant, for example, are in the shape of Chinese lanterns.

“Chinese restaurants nowadays are so cosmopolitan,” Zhang said, referring to the sleek Western décor of some Chinese restaurants in bigger cities. “I want the customers to feel that this place is Chinese.”

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