“People are so supportive, and there’s such a sense of community and loyalty,” she said. “It’s honestly what fuels me.”
Lillian Tang-Smith is back home.
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She grew up in her parent’s restaurant, Tang’s China House, and left 32 years ago for university, a career and life in Toronto but returned a year ago to run and renovate the well-known Sarnia business on Cromwell Street.
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“My heart is filled, every day,” Tang-Smith said about stories she hears regularly from Sarnia residents about their memories of meals and celebrations at the restaurant.
“People are so supportive, and there’s such a sense of community and loyalty,” she said. “It’s honestly what fuels me.”
Tang-Smith hosted a Sarnia-Lambton Chamber of Commerce Women in Business lunch at the soon-to-reopen restaurant dining room following renovations she oversaw. Tang’s has been take-out only in recent years but the dining room is set to fully reopen in the coming weeks.
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Her parents, Garry and Diana Tang, left China for Hong Kong and in the 1950s arrived in Orillia where her great uncle had a restaurant. “That’s sort of where they got their feet wet in the restaurant business,” Tang-Smith said.
A traveling insurance salesperson with whom her father was friends encouraged him to check out Sarnia where the economy was booming in the late 1960s. The couple arrived in the city in late 1969 and began running their own restaurant in a 30-seat diner on Cromwell Street in 1970.
“I was born in March and this restaurant opened in April,” Tang-Smith said.
The business grew and the restaurant expanded in 1974.
The family lived above the restaurant where Tang-Smith grew up while her parents worked long hours and didn’t take a vacation for the first seven years.
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Tang-Smith said the restaurant’s staff and regular customers were her extended family.
“They helped me with my homework, they played cards with me, they colored with me,” Tang-Smith said. “It was a bit of an unusual upbringing, for sure.”
“This was my home,” she said. But when she left as a teenager for boarding school, Tang-Smith never expected to return to Sarnia, other than to visit her parents, and never expected to be in the restaurant business.
“I was moving on to bigger and better things, so I thought,” she said.
Tang-Smith went to the University of Toronto and had various jobs working in operations for a bank, running a part-time catering business when her two children were small, and then running operations for an indoor vertical farm before moving to a medical startup.
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In 1989, there was a tragic fire at her parents’ restaurant where three of her nephews died “and I almost lost my brother who tried to save his boys,” Tang-Smith said.
Her parents sold the business and retired shortly after that. Joseph Lee bought the restaurant and continued to run it as Tang’s China House for three decades until Tang-Smith acquired it last December.
“Now, he’s in his 70s and looking to retire,” Tang-Smith said. “I’m so grateful he kept the business going.”
Tang-Smith said Lee didn’t want to see it close.
“My parents worked so hard to build it,” she said. “It was really important to me to continue their legacy.”
Her father just celebrated his 91st birthday and her mother is 87.
“She still has lots of advice for me,” Tang-Smith said. “My dad’s like, ‘You know what you’re doing; go for it.’”
Hearing the stories Sarnia residents pass along to her about their memories of the restaurant has given her a greater appreciation of what her parents accomplished and “the sense of community they built around this restaurant,” Tang-Smith said.
“I came into a business that had a history,” she said. “I didn’t have to start from scratch.”
And, along with the name recognition Tang’s China House has locally, “it helps that we’re a big red building,” she said.
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