Wilson Tang at the 9/11 Memorial.
Tang walked away from death that morning, but he also entered a new life. “I know lots of people who changed their life paths that day,” he says. “They changed careers, went to nonprofits, or quit work altogether to focus on their families. It put a lot of lives in perspective. It was definitely a turning point in my career. I instantaneously made this decision that I had to do what I love.”
The truth was, Tang didn’t much care for the world of finance. He was more drawn to his family’s restaurant business. Tang’s uncle owned the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, a Chinatown institution established in 1920 and the first place in Manhattan to serve dim sum. Wilson grew up in Chinatown and can recall when the family restaurant was sometimes a dangerous place to visit: for a period in the seventies, the crooked, two hundred-foot Doyer Street was notorious for gang shootouts. Nevertheless, weekend dim sum brunches were major events for his family.
“I have vivid memories of dim sum carts with all these different kinds of delicacies, just roaming around the restaurant,” he says. “We’d sit at round tables and all check in with each other.” It was a full sensory experience. He remembers the aromas, the visual beauty of the delicacies served. Dim sum’s literal translation is “a little bit of heart.” Compared to childhood memories like that, a career in an antiseptic office held little appeal.
Tang’s realization that he wanted to commit himself full-time to the restaurant world, however, didn’t go over well with his family.
“My parents were super upset about it,” he recalls. “Growing up as the son of immigrants, the restaurant industry was definitely somewhere my parents wanted me far away from. They felt that I needed to go to school, get my degree, and, and join the workforce.” Why, they wanted to know, would he give up a business career?
But Tang knew that restaurants were business, and he felt he could escape his cubicle and put his education to work in a more satisfying way, marrying his business and computer skills with his family’s restaurant tradition.
“I think restaurants were just kind of in my DNA,” he says.
Walking through Chinatown with Tang today feels a bit like accompanying a local prince. He’s known by shop owners and fish merchants as part of a new generation of restaurateurs bringing energy and ideas to the lower-Manhattan food scene. He spends his busy days managing a growing staff and looking for new ways to introduce a broader population to Nom Wah’s delights.
“I really like the idea of serving people good food in a friendly environment and seeing them smile,” he says. “It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to have people eat and talk and laugh in your restaurant. You are making them happy.”
