RESTAURANT NEWS | FLORIDA
Six Decades, Four Generations, and an Unknowable Amount of Fried Rice
At Wan’s Mandarin House, four generations have learned when to change, what to preserve, and why regulars notice everything.
WAN’S | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
6:03 a.m. ET, Aug. 7, 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.
Sixty candles can overwhelm even a respectable birthday cake. For a restaurant, they represent something harder to picture: thousands of Saturday nights, several generations of regulars, and an unknowable number of orders for fried rice.
Wan’s Mandarin House reaches that number this month. Lee Pong Wan and his wife, Hide Wan, opened the restaurant in Miami in 1966, when Lyndon Johnson was president and a gallon of gas cost about 32 cents. The family moved Wan’s to Broward County in 1977 and into its current Fort Lauderdale address in 2005. Four generations have now worked in the business.
Lo mein
Restaurants rarely remain open long enough to acquire that much history. Only 38 percent of restaurants founded in 2013 survived a decade later, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wan’s has repeated that decade six times, through recessions, hurricanes, changing neighborhoods, a pandemic, and an American dining public that has cycled through fondue, nouvelle cuisine, fusion, foam, and whatever it is we’re doing now.
The obvious temptation with an old restaurant is to preserve everything. That can turn history into taxidermy. Change too much, though, and the regulars begin studying the menu with the suspicion of detectives at a crime scene. Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten summed up the balance in an interview with Food & Wine: “Longevity is reinventing yourself.”
Ginger scallion lobster
Alex Kuk faced that problem when he took over Wan’s after his aunt retired in 2024. He grew up in the restaurant and knew the customers would be paying close attention. “To say the regulars were watching my every move is a major understatement,” Kuk said. “Once they saw that my goal was to refresh, not recreate what they cherished and loved, we were off at the races.”
Sweet and sour snapper
Stir fry
Wan’s will celebrate from Aug. 12 through 16 with cooking classes, family photographs, original menus, a city proclamation, and the return of ginger-scallion lobster, Hong Kong chicken, and sweet-and-sour whole snapper. A brunch on Aug. 15 will include Peking duck, ginger-scallion shrimp, Chinese broccoli, mei fun noodles, and egg-and-onion rice.
The old menus and photographs will show how much has changed since 1966. The full dining room may offer a better explanation for what hasn’t.
