Chef Martin Yan

By Wade Daniels

Title: executive chef and host of "Yan Can Cook"
Company: Yan Can Restaurant Group, Irvine and San Mateo, Calif., and Martin Yan's SensAsian Restaurant Group, Anaheim Hills, Calif.
Birth date: Dec. 22, 1948
Hometown: Guangzhou, China
Education: received diploma from Overseas Institute of Cookery in Hong Kong; bachelor's and master of science degrees in food science, University of California, Davis; honorary doctorate, culinary arts, Johnson & Wales University; honorary doctorate, humane letters, Colorado Institute of Art
Personal: married, with children
Hobbies: traveling and working with chefs around the world

In building the menu for Yan Can, a fast-casual pan-Asian chain centered on the knowledge and personality of television and cookbook chef and consulting culinarian Martin Yan, a dilemma arose concerning Kung Pao chicken sauce.

While Yan's team, which spent some 18 months in devising the menu, wanted to offer a traditional Chinese Kung Pao chicken, they doubted that many Yankees could handle the real thing.

"Most people wouldn't be able to eat that dish because it's so loaded with hot oil, chilies and Szechuan peppercorns that their mouths are literally on fire long after they've finished eating it," says Eric Beamesderfer, director of operations and culinary development for the Yan Can Restaurant Group, operator of three Yan Can locations.

The Kung Pao sauce that ended up on the Yan Can menu was thus the product of trial and error, with the team combing through the voluminous material on ingredients and techniques gathered in China.

"Kung Pao is made differently throughout China, and we know that no matter what we do, someone will say, 'Well, this isn't authentic,' " Beamesderfer says. "What probably poses the biggest challenge in our menu development is the diversity of people's tastes."

All that aside, the first palate taken into consideration for menu items is that of Yan, who launched the chain after almost a quarter century spent as a popular cooking-show host, teacher, author, research chef, and food industry and restaurant consultant.

"We pick from my favorite dishes that I love," Yan says, adding that the long process of elimination and experimentation quickly comes into play. "Some of the things that I like may be too costly or time consuming or labor intensive to do."

Specifically, Yan, who is this year's Nation's Restaurant News MenuMasters Hall of Fame inductee, loves certain types of Malaysian curries and would like to serve them, but they take many hours to prepare and require spices that are not found fresh year-round and they have a taste that is compromised in dry form.

The fast-casual Asian restaurant niche is one with a great deal of potential, and "Martin Yan is certainly a qualified-enough chef" to mine it, says restaurant industry consultant Janet Lowder, who is president of Restaurant Management Services in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

To develop and operate the Yan Can chain, Yan teamed up with Louisville, Ky.-based Yum! Brands Inc. and Hong Kong-based Favorite Restaurant Group. But the recent death of FRG chief executive Arthur Ho prompted Yum to pull out of the partnership, which in recent months had closed four restaurants. That move on the part of Yum left Yan and FRG officials to weigh their options, their representative says, including a possible management buyout of the chain's trade dress and other intellectual property and the three restaurants still in operation in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Before the opening of Yan's first eatery, he says, he shied away from running a restaurant because of the time commitment and inevitable headaches. That may sound surprising from someone who now has opened a second chain — the casual-dining SensAsian — and has had business partner meetings about starting a third chain.

SensAsian, now with two locations in Orange County, Calif., opened in March 2003 and is a full-service restaurant with main courses from $8.95 to $17.95, as opposed to $6.95 to $8.95 for entreés at Yan Can. For SensAsian, Yan partnered again with Favorite Restaurant Group and with Jim Gressert, a property developer. Yan expects the chains to expand but is taking it slowly, carefully scouting locations and honing the menus and operation.

The third chain is something that Yan describes as a "dream."

"We want to develop a restaurant so gorgeous that people will come from all over the world, and it will become a destination," Yan says. "We will open maybe just four of them — in New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco — so people can come for an incredible dining experience, where the surroundings and the energy and service are incredible."

There is not yet a name for the concept, though Yan expects it will be something jocular, along the lines of SensAsian.

In developing new menu items for his restaurant, Yan says he enjoys traveling in Asian countries, learning from other chefs, teaching and doing things like sampling street food, small items that with a few tweaks might become a restaurant entrée.

"You can do that with a lot of Asian foods, just like the way you can buy an old house and turn it into a beautiful mansion," he says.

Running restaurants indeed has brought headaches, Yan says, but for the most part they have been manageable and were outweighed by rewards.

"The challenges have been more of professional and culinary and technical ones, which I like," he says. "But sometimes it's also a lot of fun because you get comments people love this or that, and when I go to one of the restaurants where people know who I am, they watch the show.

"I was just in [a Yan Can venue] with my family in Santa Clara, and I was signing autographs and taking pictures with all the people, so it's just like I'm going to see a friend, and this is my home."