A Jewish Restauranteur of Chinese Dishes in New York City

choi

Laura Neilson, The Big Cheese of Chinese. At the end of a long day, , what the restaurateur really wants is a home-cooked meal. Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 59070142111656.html

two consecutive paragraphs:

"If you're a New York Jewish guy, you grew up eating Chinese food. That's what you do. I grew up loving spare ribs, chicken and almonds, shrimp and lobster. It was tasty. It was accessible to me.

"I started learning Chinese cooking from Grace Chu, an upper-class Mandarin lady from Shanghai. I was 17 or 18, and she was probably 70. If you wanted to study Chinese cooking in New York City, she was the doyenne.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest of the interview.
(b) "IT HAS BEEN 40 YEARS since Ed Schoenfeld helped open Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan, New York City's first four-star Chinese restaurant."
(i) The German/ Jewsih surname Schoenfeld (German spelling: Schönfeld) are name of places, "from Middle High German schoen ‘beautiful’ + velt ‘open country’, ‘field.’"
(ii) Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan has npo Chinese name.
‎(c) a big cheese:
"(humorous) an important or powerful person in a group or organization <Apparently her father is a big cheese in one of the major banks>"
Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/a+big+cheese