PITTSBURGH -- Ming-Na Wen spent her teenage years completely enveloped in the high-energy, often demanding environment of a family restaurant.

Even today, decades and thousands of miles removed from the sights, sounds and smells of Chinatown Inn, the historic Pittsburgh restaurant her family has owned and operated since 1943, the actor known as the voice of Mulan or as Fennec Shand in “The Mandalorian” can recall its frenzied lunch-crowd rush and the amazing people who prepped, cooked and served its Cantonese and Chinese American fare in the 1970s and ’80s.

“Even my mom was such a character,” she says during a recent Zoom call from the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, actor Eric Michael Zee.

It wasn’t until Wen was a mother herself, and decided to write a Chinese cookbook, that she truly appreciated her youthful experiences and how they shaped her into the confident woman and great cook she is today.

“Have You Eaten Yet? Family Recipes From a Restaurant Daughter” (Simon Element, $35) is filled with more than 70 family recipes and snapshots taken over the years. The cookbook hit store shelves on Oct. 6.

It’s a classic tale of hard work, passion, memories and a desire to leave a mark over the generations.

Born in the then-Portuguese colony of Macau and raised in Hong Kong, Wen immigrated to New York when she was about 7. Her mother married an American businessman whose father owned Chinatown Inn and three years later, they moved to Mt. Lebanon to join her stepfather in running the restaurant on Third Avenue near Grant Street in Downtown. She was in the sixth grade.

As is often custom with family restaurants, Wen was expected to pitch in. She did everything from clearing and waiting tables to ringing up checks to tending bar, not just on weekends but also after classes at Jefferson Middle School and Mt. Lebanon High School.

“That was just a given,” she says. “I can’t even imagine what our Pittsburgh customers thought when this little, tiny Asian girl is just running around, seating them to the tables and taking their money at the cash register and serving them food. But that was the life of a restaurant daughter.”

When you’re growing up and just want to spend time with your friends, the nonstop grind of restaurant work “is like the last thing you want to do,” she says. “But I had no choice.”

Her perspective changed, however, after she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a drama degree in 1986 and moved to New York City to make her way as an actor.

As a single woman living on her own, she had to figure out how to survive. With a shoestring budget for meals, she learned to cook for herself in her tiny studio kitchen. For inspiration, she drew on the family dishes she learned “through osmosis” at Chinatown Inn. Within a few years, she got so good at it that it became “her thing.”

“I discovered I really enjoyed cooking,” she says. “I was constantly entertaining people with food,” even as she found success as an actor and relocated to Los Angeles.

When the mother of two started sharing pictures of the meals she made for big occasions on social media a few years ago, her fans asked for the recipes. That presented a dilemma.

“Chinese? We don’t cook with recipes,” she says with a laugh, relying on instinct and technique instead of measuring cups and spoons.

That was particularly true of her family’s well-guarded restaurant recipes, which are cooked in big batches instead of family-sized portions.

“I had to be like a mad chemist and figure it out,” she says, which explains why the cookbook took three years from start to finish.

Performing arts to culinary arts

Wen’s mother, Lin Chan, sowed the seeds for her daughter’s cookbook when she married Soo Lim Yee. Yee’s father had opened Chinatown Inn in 1943, and when the family moved from New York to Pittsburgh in the early ’70s, “Baba” — who had cooked for the U.S. Army during World War II — joined his father in running the restaurant.

By the time his father retired, Yee had developed a passion for cooking, and the kitchen was his happy place.

“I remember Baba cooking long hours in that hot kitchen,” Wen writes, “but he cherished the camaraderie with the other chefs, laughing and sharing stories and recipes.”

He also cooked East-meets-West meals at home — clam chowder during the holidays along with chow fun and chicken chow mein. As an adult, Wen realized cooking was how he showed his love for his family. “He poured his heart into every meal for us.”

Yee, who died at age 80 in 1995, passed the restaurant on to Wen’s older brother, Jonathan, in 1988, and he runs it today with his wife, Wei Yee, as its third-generation owner.

Wen, on the other hand, couldn’t get away from restaurant life fast enough.

Ever since she played a bunny in an Easter play in the third grade, she knew she wanted to be an actor. Working in her parents’ restaurant while acting in plays in Mt. Lebanon High School’s “most incredible arts program” only cemented that dream.

“My parents had two days off a year — Christmas Day and New Year’s Day,” she says. They even worked through the Chinese New Year because the traditional 15-day festival was one of Chinatown Inn’s busiest times.

Her mother wasn’t particularly happy Wen decided to study acting — she was “astonished” you could get a degree in it — but became very supportive after her daughter was admitted to Carnegie Mellon “because it was such a great school.”

In her cookbook, Wen jokes that playing June Woo in the 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club” was her “green card” to Hollywood. But her first big break actually came not long after graduating from CMU’s drama program in 1986, when she became the first Asian contract actor on a soap opera, “As the World Turns.”

Memorable roles as Dr. Jing-Mei “Deb” Chen in the medical drama series “ER” and as the voice of the title character in “Mulan” followed; she also played a martial artist in Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” In 2023, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The first ideas for a cookbook, she says, started percolating post-COVID, when the actor began posting cooking videos on Instagram. So many fans wanted the recipes that she ended up pitching her managers on the idea. They agreed and found her a literary agent who was “relentless when I was not because there was no reason for me to write a cookbook.”

Her background as a restaurateur’s daughter, however, made it work — especially after her agent came with the idea to share the recipes as a storytelling vehicle about her life as an Asian American.

As she recalls on the YouTube channel she started in July, Wen in the Kitchen with Ming-Na Wen, “I thought that would be perfect in serving my family our recipes, as well as my fans because they were part of my journey.”

It took almost two years to come up with the synopsis of what the cookbook could be before sending it out to publishers. In less than a week, more than dozen companies expressed interest. She went with an imprint of Simon & Schuster, who asked for 60-75 recipes — a number she considered daunting.

“I was like, ‘Can we just do a baby cookbook, you know, like with maybe 15?” she jokes.

But once she sat down to actually write it, she had gathered nearly 200 recipes, and the challenge became paring it down to ones the actor thought would resonate with home cooks — a boon for a second cookbook if this one does well.

Honoring her family

Filled with personal stories, family photos and touching memories, the cookbook is broken into four chapters: Hong Kong With Mom, Restaurant Classics, Feasts From Chef Baba and Ming-Na’s Kitchen.

The dishes include a wide array of Cantonese and Chinese American food — everything from scallion pancakes, beef and broccoli, and shrimp egg foo young to her step-father’s prime rib and the decidedly American pesto salmon and lasagna roll-ups that Wen makes for her own family. There’s even a vegetarian sandwich for noncooks.

“I’m really proud because it tells a little bit more about who I am,” she says. “My fans have been with me for over four decades, and I feel like they’re my extended family.”

There also is a small section on pantry fundamentals, and most recipes include practical tips, including substitutions if the cook doesn’t like or can’t find a particular ingredient.

And if you’d rather dine out than eat in? “Just look at the beautiful pictures and walk down memory lane with me,” she says.

It’s fun to think the cookbook’s title, “Have You Eaten Yet?,” is a play on the Pittsburghese phrase “Jeet jet?” Actually, it refers to the question Chinese people ask when someone visits.

“That is our welcoming love language,” Wen says. “My mother would never care about my friends’ names or what their dreams were. The most important thing for her is like, have they eaten yet. So that became the perfect title.”

While growing up in suburbia came with its share of challenges, it also made her strong.

Because she had to learn English and adapt to a whole new culture at a young age, her years in New York made her a survivor, a fighter and a go-getter. Pittsburgh, conversely, is her nurturer.

“Pittsburgh is the place that made me softer and recognize all the potential that I could have,” she says. “I mean, come on, Carnegie Mellon? Yeah!” she says, pointing to her red CMU T-shirt. “In a way, I am a yinzer, really.”

And a Terrible Towel-waving one, at that, if you follow her on Instagram.

Because her mother now lives in Las Vegas, Wen doesn’t get back to Pittsburgh as much as she’d like. But she did manage a visit with her brother about five months ago, and who knows? Maybe she’ll end up working with fellow “ER” alum Noah Wylie on “The Pitt,” which occasionally films here.

“We’re still friends, and I love him dearly. Whenever he makes that phone call, I will be there to zap him again with the defibrillator!” she says.

Wen hopes the cookbook will inspire people to get back into cooking because everything else these days has become so much about being on your phone.

“There’s just no more time to really communicate and connect with each other, right?” she says. Sharing a home-cooked meal bridges that gap.

She also aims to honor Chinatown Inn’s legacy, and how much the restaurant and her family have contributed to Pittsburgh. In 2022, it received a historical marker out front as the only remaining establishment of a small but busy Chinatown that used to exist in Downtown.

The restaurant wasn’t just a gift to her family but also to Pittsburgh, she notes in the book.

“There’s something so beautiful about a long-standing, family-owned place. It crosses generations. It becomes a marker of time, of tradition, and of the creations of new traditions.”

Chicken Chop Suey

PG tested

Rooted in the idea of turning miscellaneous ingredients and leftover scraps into a tasty dish, chop suey often gets a bad rap because it’s considered inauthentic and conjures up images of the canned versions that started appearing on supermarket shelves in the 1930s. Ming-Na Wen thinks of it as a very Americanized version of “real” Chinese cooking.

“Nevertheless, it was tasty and truly what made our family restaurant survive for so many decades,” she writes in her cookbook. “In fact, even our old neon sign at our restaurant had ‘Chop Suey’ under ‘Chinatown Inn.’” (Which may explain why it was one of former Mayor Sophie Masloff’s favorite dishes, according to a 2003 story in the Post-Gazette.)

The dish’s name means “odds and ends” or “miscellaneous bits,” so feel free to swap out, omit or add any favorite veggie that’s in your fridge. As the actor writes in the headnotes, “You don’t have to be precious with it.”

One ingredient, however, makes the dish — the crunchy chow mein noodles served on top. The more, the better!

2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch chunks

2 tablespoons light soy sauce, divided

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon vegetable oil, divided

½ teaspoon dark mushroom soy sauce

2 whole scallions, sliced lengthwise

2 1-inch nobs ginger, peeled and thinly sliced

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 carrots, peeled and diced

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup bean sprouts

8-ounce can sliced water chestnuts, drained

1 cup hot water or chicken broth

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 tablespoons water mixed with 2 tablespoons cornstarch

Cooked white rice, for serving

Chinese crunchy noodles, for serving

In a medium-sized bowl, rub chicken with 1 tablespoon light soy sauce, cornstarch, 1 tablespoon oil and the mushroom soy sauce. Set aside.

Heat a large wok to medium-high and add remaining 1 cup oil. Once it’s hot, add scallions and ginger.

Add chicken and cook without disturbing until seared on one side, about 2 minutes. Make sure the chicken easily comes off the wok, then flip it and cook until seared on the other side for about 2 minutes more. Stir for an additional minute, then remove chicken from the oil and set aside in a bowl.

Discard all but 1 tablespoon oil in wok. Over medium-high heat, add onion and cook, stirring constantly, until translucent, about 5 minutes.

Add carrots and celery and cook, stirring constantly, until tender but still crisp, about 3 minutes.

Toss in bean sprouts and water chestnuts, then stir in hot water, remaining tablespoon of light soy sauce, sugar and salt.

Add chicken and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Bring the liquid to a boil and stir in the cornstarch slurry to thicken.

Serve over rice with crunchy noodles on top.

Serves 4.

— “Have You Eaten Yet?” by Ming-Na Wen (Simon Element, $35, Oct. 6, 2026)

Crispy Five-Spice Pork Chops

PG tested

This weeknight-friendly recipe is a riff on the five-spice pork chops Ming-Na Wen and her brother Jonathan ate in New York’s Chinatown while growing up. Her mother, Lin Chan, first served it at a first birthday party for the actor’s daughter, Michaela, in 1998.

“When she started deep-frying them,” she writes in her cookbook, “the smell of garlic and five-spice immediately made everyone’s mouth water. When she served them, we couldn’t get enough; they disappeared almost immediately.”

If you don’t care for pork, you can substitute boneless chicken thighs. I served the chops with sauteed Chinese cabbage.

6 boneless pork loin chops

½ teaspoon ground white pepper (black pepper works, too)

1 teaspoon five-spice powder

1 teaspoon light soy sauce mixed with 1 teaspoon water

5 garlic cloves, chopped

1 cup panko bread crumbs

1 cup plain breadcrumbs

1 teaspoon garlic powder

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons water

1 cup corn or vegetable oil

Cooked white rice, for serving

Slice pork loins in half horizontally to make thinner pieces; place palm of your hand flat on top of the meat, with the knife horizontal to the cutting board, and cut through the side of each loin to divide it into two.

Using kitchen shears or a knife, make shallow snips or cuts into the edges around the chops in several places to prevent them from curling when frying. Trim the fat, if desired,

Put chops in plastic bag and pound to flatten them slightly to about ⅓ inch thick. Remove loins and lightly sprinkle both sides with salt and white pepper,

In large mixing bowl, add 1 slice of pork loin, sprinkle some of the five-spice and soy sauce over the top, then layer the second pork loin slice on top and repeat for all the slices.

Add chopped garlic to large resealable plastic bag and place the seasoned chops inside. Allow them to marinate with the garlic for 10-15 minutes.

In shallow dish or plate, combine panko, plain breadcrumbs, garlic powder and a pinch of salt. In another shallow bowl, whisk eggs and water together.

Drop marinated pork loins into the egg mixture on both sides. Let the excess drip off before putting the loins in the breadcrumb mixture, then coat them completely in the mixture and put them on a clean plate.

Heat oil in large wok or deep skillet over medium-high heat. Place meat in the wok and deep-fry until golden brown, 3-4 minutes on each side.

Transfer cooked chops to a paper towel-lined cutting board to absorb excess oil. Let chops rest for 5 minutes.

Serve chops whole or sliced into pieces, over rice.

Serves 4-5.

— “Have You Eaten Yet?” by Ming-Na Wen (Simon Element, $35, Oct. 6, 2026)

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