This story is unexpected. All of the characters are richly colored against a backdrop of arson, blackmail, and affairs. The work-family drama somehow remains innocent and genuine.

In this age of constant striving for perfection, Lillian Li provides us with regular, flawed but loving characters. She also provides a front row seat to the orchestration a restaurant requires which will leave you even more generous with your servers at your next meal. Life is hard but can be made easier if we all look out more for one another.

Bobby Han’s The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, has a dwindling core of dedicated customers. It was once a place where presidents and celebrities dined, but Bobby's death left the restaurant caught between his two sons, Johnny the manager, and ambitious Jimmy.

Jimmy wants to open an upscale Asian fusion restaurant where he'd never again have to serve those repulsive old Chinese dishes. But to make the dream come true, he has to look outside the law to a family connection “fixer”—without considering that fixers get where they are by making certain they get at least as much as they give. Or Else.

Tragedy strikes, hitting everyone differently, in particular middle-aged, longtime employees Nan and Ah-Jack, who have maintained a friendship that borders on the heat of something else for thirty years. Complicating it is Ah-Jack’s ill wife, and Nan’s troubled teenage son.

She illustrates with sometimes merciless clarity now not only a language barrier can keep family members of different generations from ever truly communicating (while successfully causing irritation, grief, and self-protective lies) but cultural differences.

The book is so vivid, complex, and full of insight, but the storyline was such a downer, and many of the characters difficult to connect to. I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience, except on an intellectual level—admiring the craft with which it was written as well as observing those disastrous mismatches in communication.

But a story built around unhappy toil and dysfunction is a very hard sell for me. If you are good with those aspects, I recommend this novel.

This was a decent enough summer read but it was hard to feel connected to the characters. It felt like there was a lot going on at once. It took me a while to keep the characters straight which is what prevented me from feeling connected to any of them.

Although I was a bit ambivalent towards the characters in the beginning (since there are many to keep up with), it only took a few more chapters for me to fully invest myself in the various stages of lives being lived by the family owning the restaurant, and those of the employees.

Little boss (and brother) Jimmy is resentful of his elder, Johnny, as they alternately attempt power grabs to seize control of the Duck House left to them after the death of their father a few years prior. Johnny took a sabbatical to teach back home in China, and their mother mostly stays out of it, alone in her large home, until their world is shaken when the restaurant is burned to the ground.

The story also follows the casual glacially slow love story between colleagues Nan and Jack, as they are each pushed away from their respective spouses and cling to the friendship they've built over decades. Nan's son Pat also ends up working at the restaurant after he's expelled from high school, where he quickly takes up with Johnny's daughter Annie, who is working there as well while home from college.

I wanted to like this book more, but ultimately it just didn’t work for me. I certainly liked the idea of the multigenerational Chinese family running a restaurant in the Washington, DC area (where I live), and the characters and plot were well-developed and reasonably realistic.

I think where it failed for me is that I could not develop an attachment to any of the characters: I just didn’t care about what happened to them. It took a little while to get into the story and remember who everyone was, but even then, I found I didn’t like any of them very much. It may be naive to think that people can care about each other for reasons not related to how they can manipulate them, but I certainly didn’t see any evidence of it here: being nice meant you were working an angle. By the time I finished, I was just done with this family and their trials and tribulations, as so much of it seemed self-inflicted.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This book is amazing. Set in a Chinese restaurant, the Beijing Duck House, that not only is beloved by anyone who steps foot in its door, it's also a world of its own. The owners and workers are like a family, and similar to a family, there is drama galore. 

Whether it be owner, Jimmy Han wishing to leave his late father's establishment for a fancier one, or Jimmy's older brother, Johnny and Johnny's daughter, Annie working through their own issues, or Annie's relationship with employee, Nan's son Pat causing trouble. 

When tragedy strikes and Annie and Pat are implicated, everyone will ban together to figure out just how far you are willing to go for family. 

This book was so enjoyable, I want to read it all over again! I love that it's set in a restaurant, and every time I sat down to read it, I craved Chinese food! But the familial theme throughout the book was what kept me hooked. I loved getting a peek into the lives of the characters, and how they were all intertwined, and how they all would do just about anything for each other. Teaches you what true family looks like.

I love stories centered around families and the chaos and joy they bring. I loved the heartache and humor this story brought. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Number One Chinese Restaurant follows the lives of the employees of the Duck House from a devastating fire at the old restaurant to the opening of Beijing Glory, a new concept restaurant, through their adherence to old traditions, forming of new relationships and destroying of family bonds.

The writing was crisp, clear and descriptive. The novel was easy and enjoyable to read. The characters were flawed and developed. But, I struggled with this book because I didn't like any of the characters. I felt they all made very poor choices, which made their lives worse, not better. I didn't want any of them to succeed or advance in their lives, because they didn't deserve it. They were either mean and uncaring, or doormats, letting others walk all over or use them, without speaking out about it. Maybe that was the point? To examine that with following old traditions the result would be nothing ever changing or improving.

Discussing this with others would be as interesting and thought provoking for me as writing this review has been. The author has got me thinking and I'm sure that is quite the point she was trying to make.

It’s been over forty years since Marlon Brando uttered the words, “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse” but Number One Chinese Restaurant proves that not everyone took that warning to heart.

When our story begins, Uncle Pang is eating at The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland with its owner Jimmy Han. Uncle Pang has long been a fixture in both the Duck House and Jimmy’s life; he was instrumental in getting the Han family to America and helped Bobby Han, Jimmy’s father (the original owner of the restaurant) get his start. The Duck House, profitable enough at one time, has recently fallen into decline. Jimmy dreams of a new, more fashionable eatery that will help him become a legend but he both needs and is reluctant to accept Uncle Pang’s help to get his new place open. This afternoon, the reluctant portion of him is in full ascendance and he and Uncle Pang part on acrimonious terms.

Johnny Han plays the part of yo-yo in his family, always wanting to get away and do his own thing but feeling filial obligation to keep the Duck House going. He’s been managing the front side of the restaurant – the customers, advertising, bookkeeping and schmoozing of high end clients – for years, but has recently taken a few months off to teach a course in China. Of course, disaster strikes just as he is finishing the job, preventing him from kicking around Beijing as he would like and forcing him on the next plane home.

The tragedy that strikes puts Jimmy further in the grasp of Uncle Pang. Additionally, it pulses through the lives of many others, pushing them to confront what the familiar comfort of the Duck House kept hidden.

Annie and her father were once close, but as the restaurant began to suck up more and more of her father’s time, the two drifted apart. Now she’s an angry, disillusioned young woman prone to some bad decisions, such as shop lifting, and dating bad-boy Pat.

Pat’s mom Nan is convinced he’s a good kid underneath it all, but Pat has a lot of anger over how Nan has managed their lives. His rage has led to some bad decisions, such as the school fire he set, and the mess he is making of his job at the Duck House. His latest choice, however, may very well be the worst one he has ever made.

Nan had asked for a promotion at the restaurant to protect her friend/crush Ah-Jack, an aging server who shouldn’t really spend all day and night on his feet waiting tables anymore. Her favoritism toward him has turned the other staff against her and it seems like her problems keep growing. Her son Pat has been expelled from school, forcing him to work as a dishwasher at the restaurant, which unfortunately brings him to the attention of Uncle Pang.

It would be natural to think that with all these characters as part of the story, there would be a lot happening in the plot but there really isn’t; it’s a tale of minimal forward momentum. With the exception of Jimmy, Feng Fei (the Han matriarch) and Uncle Pang, everyone in the book is just living their worst life. Nan has allowed her crush on Ah-Jack to tie her to a job she doesn’t like, and it isn’t till Pat starts to really act out that she realizes she may need to make decisions that put herself and her family first, rather than this man who has always been part of her existence but not really part of her life. Pat has made bad choices to get his mother’s attention and now that he has it, it’s for all the wrong reasons. He wants a clean start, but Ah-Jack ties his mom to the past and she can’t seem to shake that shackle. Johnny is just starting to realize that he belongs somewhere besides the Duck House but that wobbles the image he has of himself as the older son who holds the family together and cleans up their problems.

Of the three pivotal characters, only Jimmy receives much page time and that’s not a good thing; if there was a poster boy for screw-ups, Jimmy would probably be it. Given any chance to succeed or even just subsist, he fails. He failed his first restaurant job, he failed at dealing coke, he failed at the Duck House, he failed at his marriage and he adds to the list throughout the book. While the tragedy that serves as an impetus in the other character’s lives moves them small steps forward, Jimmy just changes location. That he is not in the least likable means that his ultimate failure was his inability to capture reader sympathy.

The author compensates for this with strong prose, a deep understanding of the human condition, and character clarity. We may not always like Ah-Jack, Nan, Pat or Jimmy but we do understand them. Their decisions may seem odd or foolish, but they are in perfect accord with how the author has described them. She captures the essence of who these people are and how they move through their lives very, very well.

Which is why I was disappointed that she didn’t give more page space to two people who could have really enlivened the narrative. Uncle Pang and Feng Fei move quietly in the background of the text, the unseen wind that causes the tsunamis in other’s lives; they pluck the chords that keep the others dancing to their tune. I would have been interested in getting more of their back story because what little we see of them shows them to be ruthless, but also intriguing.

The author also captures restaurant life with amazing accuracy. Anyone who has ever experienced the joy of working in food service will recognize the drama, exhaustion, poverty and joy that make up the lives of the characters who people this story.

Ultimately, Number One Chinese Restaurant is a literary novel that pulls back the curtain on the lives of a handful of people working at a failing eatery. It could have been many things – a look at the immigrant experience, a love story between two people kept apart by outside obligations for thirty years, a treatise on family squabbles – but in trying to be all of them it becomes simply a snapshot of some mildly interesting people. It’s a good bedside read for those who enjoy angsty stories and since it’s the author’s first novel, perhaps a promise of better things to come.

Very well told and entertaining story. Very good plot with three dimensional characters. Definitely worth picking up because the writing is superb. Make plenty of time for this one because once you start reading you will not want to put it down. Happy reading!

I was drawn to this because I grew up in the same area, eating the same food, experiencing much of the same. This is a fun, nostalgic read that delves into the lives of the Han 'family' and the role of food and meal sharing. Recommended for fans of the Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians.

Family drama is on the menu at the Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Md., where Johnny Han wants to keep the traditional family restaurant his late father founded, while brother Jimmy dreams of upscale Asian fusion. A mysterious fire may decide the restaurant’s fate, even as long-time staffers Ah-Jack and Nan explore love, Johnny’s daughter Anna rebels with dishwasher Pat, and secretive Uncle Pang plays godfather. A delicious debut.
Special to the Minneapolis Star Tribune 6/3 2018

I'm sure everyone has a "Number One Chinese Restaurant" in their area. I myself have three literally all under 8 miles from my door step each, and all owned by different people of course. I saw the title, and knew I had to read it.

I read the first two chapters bright and early at 5 AM and really should have waited until I was more awake. I remember thinking, "wait, what?" So many characters and character dynamics are introduced so fast that it was an issue for me. I needed to reread some. Character names are also a little similar so it's important to pay attention and get them down. Literally when I had read 60% of the book, I was still trying to remember who was who.

I finish every book I start hoping to give it a chance. I'm no quitter. I also believe that books are obviously subjective and even if I'm not liking something, I want to find what others did like about it; but, 20% in and I was really having a hard time. There was information that I felt was pointless and irrelevant, there were characters I could remember for the life of me, and a story line that was hard to follow but I kept on.

This story centers around so many dysfunctional characters it was hard to feel empathy towards any of them. If you've read The Nest, it is a similar concept with multiple family members working against one another and all of them are just really awful people. I didn't like The Nest in contrast to popular opinion so that may be why I feel impartial to this story as well.

The story also jumped from past to present and sometimes from character to character without any warning or logical reason to. It became confusing and overwhelming and I found myself rereading paragraphs.

Overall, it was funny and clever but I think that the never ending subplots were too much and left me a little confused at points and wanting to focus on something different. I also wanted to feel connected or see at least one person succeed in his/her endeavors but just really hated everyone this book introduced me to.

The book also ended abruptly for me. I can see other people being drawn into this but it just wasn't for me.

This book left me laughing, crying, and hungry. It was a heart-warming and heart-breaking multi-generational novel that will make you think about your relationships with your parents, your colleagues, and the employees of the restaurants you frequent. It was also a unique look into an immigrant experience not always written about. A wonderful debut for Lillian Li

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on June 19, 2018

At the age of 40, Jimmy is one of the youngest workers at the Duck House, a D.C. restaurant that he and his brother Johnny inherited from their father. Jimmy is known to his staff as “the little leader.” The restaurant manager is Nan, whose plan to spend more time with her son Pat by hiring him a dishwasher has been a disaster. Johnny is teaching a class in Hong Kong, taking a break from the restaurant business, but events force Johnny’s premature return to D.C., where he must listen to his mother’s remonstrations about what a bad son he has been.

Based on a brief internship in a fancy restaurant, Jimmy yearns to prepare gourmet fusion dishes of his own creation, not his father’s Americanized Chinese dishes that are so popular with his customers. Jimmy plans to open a new restaurant with the help of a real estate agent (and new lover) named Janine, an idea that initially had the support of Jimmy’s Uncle Pang, for whom Jimmy used to deal drugs. When Jimmy learns just what kind of shady help Pang has planned, Jimmy has second thoughts. But Pang is not so easily put off, and he soon ignites family turmoil in his scheme to undermine Jimmy.

Number One Chinese Restaurant is very much a family novel; if characters are not related by blood, they have become part of the family by virtue of working for decades at the Duck House. As is common in family novels, marriages are troubled, siblings are at odds, and children are rebellious. Family members form and dissolve alliances, plot against each other, and come together when it counts — unless they don’t.

A good bit of the novel is also a love story involving elderly Duck House waiter Ah-Jack, whose wife has found a younger man, and Nan, whose husband lives in California, and who worries that her friendship with Ah-Jack might jeopardize her friendship with Ah-Jack’s wife. The Ah-Jack love triangle offers the novel’s best insights into how married life evolves over time, how love might endure even if a marriage doesn’t. Some insights are serious and others are not. This is Ah-Jack on the secret of a long marriage: “A strong marriage came when the wedded stopped trying to plumb their partner’s depths. Life became easier when one passed the years with an amiable stranger and not a mirror that reflected back all of one’s flaws.” I put that one in the pile of serious insights, but other readers might disagree.

Finally, as the title implies, Number One Chinese Restaurant is a restaurant novel, one that spends a bit of time in the kitchen, explaining how a well-oiled restaurant prepares meals efficiently and flawlessly, how waiters serve them without crashing into each other, and how owners and managers woo important customers. I don’t spend much time in the kitchen but I like to eat, and I’m a fan of restaurants and of restaurant novels. The nuts-and-bolts of operating a restaurant is a small but essential part of the story.

The combination of geriatric love story, family drama, and restaurant novel is a tough balance, but Lillian Li mixes the elements with light and dark humor, combining sweetness with sadness, love with backbiting, honesty with evil schemes. Li’s light touch makes Number One Chinese Restaurant a fun and easy read, but the story offers serious life lessons as memorable characters make difficult choices and uneasy compromises, confronting problems that are common to every family, whether or not they operate a restaurant.

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I really wanted to love this book - the blurb sung to me and immediately piqued my interest.

The opening scene felt like the reader had a go-pro and was whirling round a busy Chinese restaurant - it was fast paced and exciting. Unfortunately, I felt like as I continued reading there were more characters introduced and not much happening in terms of plot progression. I just wasn’t compelled to keep reading, There were attempts to keep the pace up, including pseudo-mafia Uncle Pang, but to me it fell flat. I liked the author’s writing so will give her next book a go. Ultimately this was a DNF for me.

I liked this book but don't think this would be a story that I would read again. I like the cover and I like the characters but don't like how none of the characters really understand each other.and I feel there is too much going on at once. I worked at a Chinese Restaurant for years and I still felt that it was lacking something. The book was likable enough and I do feel that some will enjoy this very much so they could learn how things work in different cultures and the different communication through the characters will be humorous at times and enjoyable. This may not be the title for me but I see a lot of potential in the story line and I am interested in checking out the author's other works.

Fascinating look at the family involved with a Chinese restaurant- both the Hans who own it and Nan and Jack who work there, along with the amigos (who are mentioned but don't really figure in the story.) Although it's ostensibly set in suburban DC (with the new restaurant in Georgetown), it could be set anywhere. At first things seem frantic, as Jimmy is struggling with his plan to close the Duck House and move to the new place and the characters are introduced. One fault with this is that you don't get a real sense of the back story with Pang and the Hans (or Nan and Jack) until late in the game. While somewhat it's somewhat uneven, I still enjoyed this very much. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. An interesting new voice.

Nobody understands anyone else in this novel. That may be true for some people and some families, but I didn't find it fun to read about. There is no happy beginning, no happy middle, and absolutely no happy ending. I just felt sorry for everyone involved.