Twice-cooked pork
CHEF PROFILES | OHIO
Liu Fang: The Chef Who Turned Homesickness Into a Menu
ABUNDANCE | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | Jan. 12, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Liu Fang’s first Cleveland kitchen was not a restaurant kitchen. It was nothing more than a home kitchen that had become a command center, a place where night and day soon got very blurry. Her husband was on the other side of the globe, and the hours did not line up. “I would stay up at night my time and practice making dumplings and buns as a way to work through the agony of feeling helpless.”
That impulse—cook, focus, survive—now has a name on the door in Cleveland Heights: Abundance Culinary, a modern Chinese restaurant that operates out of a former diner car and serves food that refuses the tired American shorthand for “Chinese.” It is the kind of place that makes a city quietly recalibrate what it thought it knew. It is also the latest chapter in a life that has already included coal mines, Beijing beer, and the particular whiplash of building something enormous and then leaving it behind.
Liu Fang
Fang grew up in Qufu, in China’s Shandong province, raised by her grandparents in a place she describes in plain terms. “When you grow up in a rural area in China, food can be quite seasonal and at some points scarce. But my grandfather always made sure that I had enough protein and fresh vegetables to eat.” She was an only child growing up without a father around, and school was treated like the family’s only viable exit. “This left little to no time for me to spend in the kitchen learning to prepare meals. Every spare minute of her childhood seemed to be dedicated to one goal: acing exams.
Her memories are of Qufu’s grittiness and also its food. “The winter season was a lot of coal and smog but also food carts with giant woks of chestnuts roasting in black volcanic pebbles, drum tandoori ovens on wheels that roasted sweet potatoes on hot coals, and candied hawthorn on long sticks.” She remembers the logistics of summer meals without refrigeration, the market stops, and her grandfather’s three-wheeled pedal truck. “He would buy me sugarcane to gnaw on or sweet corn.”
Fang with her grandparents, son, and a family friend
Adulthood did not begin in restaurants. It began in industry. After college in Hubei province, she met the man who would become her husband, Carl Setzer. She was working in the coal-mining industry when the two of them met again after years apart, fell in love, and got married. They moved to Dalian, the coastal city in northeast China, and when Setzer’s IT security work pulled them to Beijing, they fell into craft beer—and soon it would create an entirely new path for both of them.
Abundance Culinary
Fang’s five-star red noodle
In 2010, Fang and Setzer opened Great Leap Brewing, Beijing’s first craft brewery. Fang handled government relations, HR, and finance; Setzer ran production and the front-facing parts of the business. They expanded it into something far larger than a humble taproom. “The day that China admitted Covid was real and needed to be addressed we had 230 employees and five retail locations.”
In 2020, they moved to Cleveland—Setzer’s hometown orbit—when the pandemic hit and the practical problem of prenatal care turned into the bigger question of where a family could safely exist. Fang describes leaving China as a blur of airports, time zones, and uncertainty.
Lamb and tomato dumplings
Cleveland was supposed to be temporary. It became permanent the hard way. When Setzer traveled back to China to handle business, he was detained after testing positive for COVID-19 and held for more than a month in a medical detention center. Back in Ohio, Fang cooked to cope, and then cooked to share. She built an audience through pop-ups at Larder Delicatessen & Bakery, sometimes selling 4,000 dumplings in a day.
Sweet and spicy noodles
Buns and vegan dumplings
In 2023 she made the pop-up permanent with Abundance Culinary in Cleveland Heights, operating out of a former diner space shared with Rising Star Coffee Roasters. Fang cooks Chinese food in a Western kitchen with limited space and no woks, while also chasing ingredients she refused to compromise on, including Sichuan peppercorns sourced directly through relationships built years earlier. The menu reads like a map of cravings and memories made precise: dumplings with fillings like lamb and stewed tomatoes with aged vinegar, dan dan noodles with bullhorn pepper sauce and a soft-boiled tea egg, and lazi chicken punched up with pepper, ginger, garlic, and fermented bean paste.
The restaurant kept growing. By late 2024, it earned recognition from Plate Magazine’s Chefs to Watch list. Fang describes the work in terms that felt less like “success” and more like a return to self. “It’s a pure delight to get lost in my menus and rediscover myself everyday through the flavors of my youth, my culture and my future.”
She talks about Cleveland the way a person talks about an overnight guest that arrived unexpectedly. “I never thought Cleveland would be home, but it provided us with a sanctuary and I am grateful every time I hear my kids laughing, without a care in the world.”
Fang did not move her life from China to Ohio so much as translate it, one dish at a time, until homesickness started sounding less like loss and more like dinner.
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