The Little Chef Still Afloat in Waves of Changes in Ocean Beach

A small business feels the heat in OB’s changing landscape

By Brett Warnke

Maryanne Hsu does not stop moving.

Her restaurant, The Little Chef on Newport Avenue, is a busy reef of patrons.  There are a few tables occupied as I entered and a teenager wearing an Ohio shirt who flung a fortune cookie to his friend.  Both quit their tables with stray grains of fried rice lying on dirty plates, as empty as he left the tip jar.  Maryanne quickly tidied up.

Maryanne Hsu. Photo by Brett Warnke

Her Little Chef is little bigger than a Point Loma heiress’s closet, but it is a delicious local spot where she has spent roughly 65 hours of each of the 7 days a week she works since she immigrated to San Diego in 1990.

As rents rise in Ocean Beach large corporations like Target plot to alter the town’s landscape, small-businesses like Maryanne’s are feeling the pinch.  Locally, it is part of a two-pronged threat to the current community of Ocean Beach — vacation rentals and a “re-development” that favors the hip, the large, and the young.  This transformation is part of a larger national story, one where big-business monopolies dictate terms, control the destinies of entire states, and accelerate the working lives of people struggling to keep up and make a living with a measure of independence.

But Maryanne has felt larger social forces pushing on her since she was born in Taiwan to Chinese refugees who fled the Communist victory in the long civil war that ended in 1949.

As I perched myself on one of her stools and removed my notepad (in that self-important way reporters do), I realized my own sloth and Maryanne’s swiftness.

I may be thirty-five years younger, but before I had creaked open my notebook Maryanne had taken a phone order, delivered two steaming take-outs arriving from the kitchen and greeted three additional patrons asking about the menu.  She welcomed them as she had me, with her beautiful skin, straight short-cropped hair, and a perpetual smile that makes you want to order the right side of the menu.

“How did you end up in Ocean Beach?” I asked.

“It was a mistake!” she said.

We both laughed.  Perhaps “accident” would fit even better.  After finishing college, Maryanne and her twin sister bought the Little Chef, previously a donut shop, from Michael Johnson who also rented space next door.  But working with family can be as difficult as working with cooks who didn’t speak the English she was learning in a building whose pipes leaked into the street.

Maryanne was left to run the restaurant herself.

“I didn’t know how to cook,” she said.  “I still don’t know how to cook.”

Maryanne got her recipes in her first months in OB from a Chinese chef and her inexpensive prices have drawn in her local neighbors on Newport.  Her cooks create each meal from scratch, a task that takes more time and effort but keeps the texture and flavor lost in bland buffets. Steve Mallory, whose furniture stores surround Maryanne’s, popped in to drop off a healthy shake for his friend.

“Maryanne is one of the nicest people ever,” he said.  “She gives and gives and gives to people around here.”

Her generosity may come from a life lived as an outsider.  Her Shanghai-raised father served in the military and fought for General Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT or Guomindang but the price for losing the Civil War was exile to Taiwan, and the blacklist.  Even decades after the war, public officials couldn’t return to find work.  And many local Taiwanese—shopkeepers and farmers who spoke their own language—were suspicious of the Chinese newcomers who lived on military bases peppered around the island and treated the mainland Mandarin-speakers with annoyance or outright hostility.

But by the 1970s, many of Maryanne’s generation with the means were leaving for more schooling and opportunity abroad.  Her first husband immigrated to Brazil and she followed her twin sister to California, hoping to continue school and complete a CPA.

“I wanted to be an accountant, but I became The Little Chef slave,” she said with a chuckle.

During the one longer vacation she has taken her life in 1999, Maryanne was able to visit mainland China for the first time.

As we spoke, Maryanne plucked at her shirt that clung to her in the August heat and the wok behind her popped and smothered a high orange flame.  I realized that our interview was the first break Maryanne had taken all day.  The restaurant was still for a moment and filled with the sweet scent of sauces.  I looked at the specials on the board, the massive menu on the wall, and she took a breath under the undulating dragons crawling across her walls.  She smiled pensively, considering the changes in OB since she arrived, and leaned over as if preparing to take my order like she had done dozens of times that day, hundreds of times that week.

“Rent is going up,” she said.  “There used to be more locals and regulars … but now it is tourists.”

Tourists and twenty-somethings are Maryanne’s life now because she lives in the College Area Near SDSU and works on ever-busy Newport.

As I left, the phone rang again and Maryanne waved to me as a small column of hungry patrons pushed their way into The Little Chef.  It was 5:30 p.m. and Maryanne’s day was not over yet.