In this episode of So You Want to Open a Restaurant, we catch up with Charles Wong, Owner & Pitmaster of Umamicue. This Chicago restaurant is making waves with an innovative concept – Central Texas style smoking merged with Chinese and Vietnamese flavors.
Today, Charles is an award-winning chef and his restaurant is attracting national attention. But his journey into the restaurant business started in an unlikely place. Once upon a time, Charles was an over-stressed finance professional. Then, he tasted a brisket so good, it changed the trajectory of his entire life.
So how exactly does a person go from spreadsheets and stock tickers to smokers and slow cookers? You’ll want to hear it directly from Charles so check out the whole episode. But here are just a few of our favorite moments.
Today, Charles Wong is getting all kinds of attention. In 2024, he earned the Rising Star Chef Award. Then he bested his fellow chefs as this year’s Utility Show winner. But his path to culinary stardom began in a place we can all relate to – in a long line, waiting for food.
Never underestimate the power of your restaurant’s food. Charles grew up in a family where food played a central role in gathering and connecting. But it took a life-altering experience at a special restaurant for Charles to find his true calling.
“I really started to get interested in barbecue when I went down to Austin, Texas, and I tried Franklin Barbecue for the first time,” says Charles. “That's when I had the Texas-style brisket.”
Charles describes his visit to this landmark Texas barbecue joint as a transcendent moment. But now, Charles realized he had a serious problem. “How do we get this in Chicago? Because back at that time, we didn't have any Texas-style barbecue in Chicago,” Charles tells us. “That kind of took me down a deep, dark path, of trying to get that brisket to be Texas style.”
When Charles embarked on that deep, dark path, he was still working in finance. As Charles recalls, “Growing up as a child of immigrant parents, they were like, ‘Hey, we took the ultimate sacrifice to get here and now the best path is to just do really well in school and get a very stable job.’”
Finance just seemed like a logical pathway to that stable job. But the reality is that Charles wasn’t having a whole lot of fun in finance. So he found his outlet elsewhere. As soon as he got home from that business trip to Austin, Charles bought a smoker, and started experimenting with brisket on his Chicago highrise balcony.
“I was just messing around and doing it for friends and family,” says Charles. “I didn't want to really turn this into a business. I just wanted to do it for fun.” And he was having fun. On the other hand, working in finance was taking its toll on his health. His doctor advised him to find ways of reducing his work-related stress, and Charles wasted no time doing exactly that.
“The next day,” Charles tells us, “I walked in and I was like, ‘I'm gonna give you my notice right now.’”
Starting a restaurant business as a way to reduce stress might strike some as ironic. But for Charles, the early results were encouraging. By this time, he’d spent several years perfecting his smoking technique for friends and family. Now, he was now prepared to use his newfound freedom to launch a business.
“So February 19, 2020,” he recalls, “ we did our first pop-up. We sold out, and we're like, ‘Let's look for a brick and mortar.’ And then a month later, something weird happened with the world, and we're all wearing masks…So we had to pivot.”
Charles was not derailed by the pandemic. His fledgling operation made the most of this strange time. “We did a lot of meal prepping for people – friends and friends of friends. So it was really exciting. We learned a ton. We delivered all over the city and suburbs.“
When things started to open up again, Charles traveled back to Austin to stage at LeRoy & Lewis – a BBQ joint that now enjoys a Michelin Star rating. Charles was still on a mission to master Texas-style smoking. But he also started to put more thought into how he could bring his own life experiences and heritage to the table.
After all, Charles points out “Food is really in our language.”
“You know, when I was younger,” says Charles, “we would celebrate with food. We'd mourn with food. Food was always around. And I think part of the reason is, when my parents were growing up, they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. So it was really important for them to provide food on the table every single day for us.”
It was only when Charles infused his growing passion for smoking with this personal story that Umamicue was born.
Charles speaks with deep passion about food. (His descriptions of Umamicue’s Smoked Crab Rangoon and Brisket Bahn Mi will make you want to book a flight to Chicago right now!)
But he also makes an important point about achieving success.
“You have to understand that it's a business,” he advises. “You can't take things personally. As chefs and restaurants, we're vulnerable every single day we put our food out. We may read things that are disappointing and not true about what we do, but you have to take that with a grain of salt.”
Be receptive to input from everywhere, even if you don’t love what you’re hearing. And use that input to get better. As you experience the ups and downs of restaurant ownership, Charles advises, “don’t let your ego get in the way of what's happening and what people's experiences are.”
As a chef, you may be the one telling your story, but ultimately, it’s about your audience. The diner always comes first.
Clearly, Charles has mastered this part of the equation, because Umamicue is constantly earning glowing reviews, landing on best-of lists, and grabbing industry headlines.
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