The Fung’s Kitchen dining room was humming with urgency. It was the late lunchtime hour on Christmas Eve in Houston (temperature: 65 degrees Fahrenheit), and the usual collection of people who find themselves at a Chinese restaurant on this day, mostly Asian and Jewish families, gathered around large round tables in the sprawling space. The restaurant had parted the “secret” wood and red lacquer door, ornately decorated with a gold phoenix and dragon—a door that might look like a back wall to diners who’ve visited Fung’s only on slower days, but when opened reveals the restaurant extending to more than twice the size.

Servers pushed around double-decker stainless steel carts for the dim sum service that Fung’s offers every weekend, which is especially popular over certain holidays. Diners themselves looked around seeking what they wanted from the mobile menu on wheels.

Where’s that lady who had those balls that looked interesting?

I absolutely need one of those pudding bunnies before they run out.

We were about to close out the Year of the Rabbit, after all. The well-oiled Fung’s machine is the result—like so many Houston dining staples—of generations of a family’s expertise and hard work. Since the early 1980s, Hoi and Nancy Fung, followed by their two children Doris and Gilbert, have made a mark on Houston’s food scene in more ways than one.

A fourth-generation restaurateur, Hoi began cooking in Hong Kong as a teenager in 1971 in his father’s seafood restaurant. A decade later, Nancy, who worked in the personnel department of another restaurant in town, walked into the Fung family’s dining room to celebrate the birthday of her brother-in-law, who happened to be a classmate of Hoi’s. Hoi came out to say hello, and, while today they are both coy in retelling exactly what happened, the rest is history.

Nancy and Hoi married in 1982 in Hong Kong, then honeymooned in Hawaii and went to visit Nancy’s father, who lived in San Francisco. Hoi is a great chef, her father said. He should consider cooking in the States. That same year, the couple moved to Houston, citing a reason for choosing the city that many immigrants give. “I like the weather in Houston. It’s similar to Hong Kong,” Hoi says. “The East Coast is too cold—I don’t like the ice, okay?”

Hoi cooked in other people’s restaurants for eight years before opening his own in 1990. Fung’s Kitchen originally occupied 3,000 square feet in a small strip just east of Asiatown. Over the years, the family gradually acquired more space as neighboring businesses vacated, extending the footprint of the restaurant to the 20,000 square feet it is today, which includes six private dining rooms.

While dim sum is popular at Fung’s, real ones know to come here for the live seafood. But it wasn’t always this way. The business opened first as a buffet restaurant; then Hoi began introducing game meat like wild boar and venison. At the time, he says, Houston’s Chinese restaurants were mostly serving Americanized dishes like chop suey and General Tso’s chicken, as well as the spicy foods of the Szechuan and Hunan provinces.

Eventually, Hoi brought Cantonese-style live seafood to Fung’s, serving fresh and seasonal catch such as lobster and king crab. He believes it’s the most difficult to cook of all the regional Chinese cuisines. The restaurant has 12 live tanks—all maintained at different pH levels depending on which fish or crustacean is spending its last few hours in there before it meets its delicious fate. The cooking time must be carefully calculated based on the weight of the catch and the flow of the guest experience.

This meticulous approach to running a restaurant is the environment in which Doris, 39, and Gilbert, 40, grew up. Neither had planned to work in the restaurant industry, but it has a way of pulling you in. Doris, who goes by Dory, studied at Houston Community College to become an elementary school teacher, but took a cooking class as an elective. She ended up switching degrees in her last year and majoring in pastry.

Dory could make amazing desserts by the time she graduated, but when she worked in the Fung’s dim sum kitchen for a couple of months for educational purposes, she learned how difficult this culinary art is—the many pleats and folds of a dumpling are very precise and made by hand. “I’ve never gotten in trouble so much for messing up,” she says, laughing about it today.

She went on to work in some of Houston’s best kitchens, including the now-closed but highly acclaimed Poitín and Yauatcha, as well as the restaurants of Hotel Zaza and the Houston Country Club. She launched a popular pop-up series, Secret Taste, where she and her chef friends hosted dinners in mansions. Dory even returned to Houston Community College to teach pastry as a side gig. For almost 20 years, she worked seven days a week between teaching, cooking, and other projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic made her come to a screeching halt. She lost her restaurant job, which she says turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it allowed her the opportunity to start a family. Today, she juggles teaching part-time at the college and raising her 2-year-old, Caleb, whose mention prompts Hoi to grin widely in a proud grandfatherly way. While Fung’s Kitchen used to be open every day, he says the restaurant is now closed on Mondays so the whole family can spend some time with its newest (and objectively cutest) member.

As for Gilbert, he initially wanted to be an engineer, then went into marketing and restaurant management, running the catering and events program at Fung’s. In 2022, he opened Dim Sum Box in Katy’s rapidly growing Chinatown, which offers both traditional dim sum as well as more modern takes, like shu mai breaded and fried with panko and “XL” soup dumplings infused with wasabi or truffle oil. He says he wants to honor his father’s recipes while also trying to appeal to Gen Z.

Gilbert says the pandemic was a blessing in disguise for him, too, as the drastically reduced staff at Fung’s Kitchen allowed him to learn every station and role in the restaurant, preparing him well when he finally opened his own after much-delayed construction. Fung’s had more than 100 employees, but after the restaurant closed to dine-in for three months during lockdown, it reopened with just family.

In the early COVID days, even Hoi was bussing tables, just one of many examples of the patriarch’s dedication. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey ripped off part of the restaurant’s roof, shut off the gas lines, and soaked the interior in three inches of floodwater. Fung’s had a 300-person wedding scheduled for a week later—and it was going to happen, Hoi insisted. Not wanting to wait for the insurance payout, when he knew manpower would wane as everyone booked up, he immediately hired a cleaning company, got a new carpet and roof put in, and hosted the wedding party as planned.

Hurricanes and pandemics aside, the longest stretch Houstonians went without Fung’s was actually due to a fire in January 2021 that closed the restaurant for almost two years. Ever the businessman, Hoi took this opportunity to completely renovate and modernize the restaurant. Fung’s finally reopened in November 2022, with new touches and decorations mixed with his old art collection.

While Nancy is now retired (or as retired as someone in the restaurant business can be), Hoi is still in the kitchen every day and wants to work a few more years. “Cooking is my life,” he says. His quick thinking in the face of adversity stems from a desire for Fung’s to always be open for the community, even after a hurricane or fire or pandemic, and especially during the holidays.

But 2023 was the first-ever year that Fung’s Kitchen was willingly closed on Christmas Day. It fell on a Monday and, well, that’s Caleb’s day.