ChoLon chef Lon Symensma reveals the secret cancer battle that changed everything

When chef Lon Symensma opened his flagship downtown restaurant ChoLon Bistro in October of 2010, the rising star of the New York restaurant scene said at the time that he chose Denver because he wanted to be part of a blossoming culinary community.

That wasn’t exactly true. 

“I was just talking shit,” he says now. “I would have never left New York City if I was healthy and happy.”

But Symensma was neither healthy nor happy. The truth is, he came to Denver expecting to die. 

Just a few years earlier, Symensma was on a roll that most chefs would kill for. At 19, he was part of a team representing the United States at the Culinary Olympics in Berlin, Germany, where he earned a silver medal. He then graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and, after staging across Europe, went to work for legendary chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his eponymous Manhattan restaurant. 

Symensma continued training across Southeast Asia and became the opening sous chef at New York’s Spice Market, and then on to the critically acclaimed Buddakan as chef de cuisine, where he eventually became executive chef. 

The press soon took notice, with appearances on Good Morning America, the CBS show “Chef on a Shoestring,” and “Martha Stewart Living Radio.” It was May 2009, while in the middle of a photo shoot for a feature in Art Culinaire magazine, that he got the fateful call.

“Are you sitting down?” said the voice on the other end of the line. 

It was the dermatologist he had recently visited after noticing a strange purple bump on his leg.  And the news wasn’t good: Cancer. In-transit melanoma. Advanced. 

“The next thing I know, I’m in surgery, and they scoop a big chunk of my leg out,” Symensma says. “Then I get another call: They’re like, ‘We didn’t get the margin; you have to come back.’ I mean, I’m running the busiest restaurant in the country right now.”

And then the real bombshell: The cancer had metastasized into his lymphatic system. Symensma was told that there was an 85% chance he wouldn’t live more than five years. He was 32. 

“At that point, I was pushing for ‘Food & Wine’ best new chef. I’m going for every award. I’m putting myself in place for getting James Beard nods. And then I had to kind of just put everything on pause and figure out what my life was gonna be.”

Despite being visibly weakened by crutches following his surgery and long absences for follow-up visits, Symensma told no one about the diagnosis. Soon, he found the people he thought were friends quickly angled to take advantage of his sudden vulnerability.

With two best friends from high school living in Denver and family in California, an idea to move west began to hatch.

“I figured, if I’m gonna die, I’m gonna go be closer to family and friends and have a community of people around me, rather than slugging it out in New York,” he says. “So I moved to Denver.”

When he arrived, Symensma threw himself fully into the work of opening ChoLon and kept his condition a secret. The restaurant made an immediate splash with a creative menu featuring a modern take on Asian street food like pot stickers, wok dishes, and, of course, his famous French onion soup dumplings. The sexy style and service were a sharp left turn from Denver’s meat-and-potatoes reputation at the time. Even today, ChoLon is largely seen as a milestone in the city’s culinary evolution.

The day-to-day grind pushed out the mental noise and constant worry associated with having a terminal condition. While ChoLon thrived — it was a James Beard Foundation Award finalist for “Best New Restaurant” in the country — both his physical and mental health were deteriorating. 

“It was just like a feeling of being lesser than,” Symensma says. “You feel broken. There’s something wrong with me, like I can’t do all these things I wanted to do.” 

In 2012, Symensma’s doctor put him on an experimental drug, which began to have a positive effect. The purple bumps on his leg started to fade. He and business partner Christopher Davis-Massey then formed ChoLon Concepts and introduced new concepts like YumCha, Bistro LeRoux, and Gusto, and opened ChoLon Bistro in both Sloan’s Lake and Denver International Airport.

But a decade of hiding his condition and bottling up the fear and anxiety had become too ingrained a habit to let up, leading to a toxic lifestyle that affected everyone around him, Symensma says. He continued to avoid professional opportunities that could have further raised his profile but also potentially exposed his condition. One notable example was withdrawing from the late-stage audition process for season 18 of “Top Chef” set in Portland. 

“I just zipped it up, and I lived this whole weird, separate life that led to a lot of mental health things,” he says. “I spent most of my 30s living in fear, kind of being like Jekyll and Hyde, and having two sorts of lives. And I’m finding out now that that probably wasn’t the healthiest way to really deal with things. I suppressed a lot of feelings and emotions, and I didn’t communicate things well.”

Ironically, it was the pandemic and ensuing restaurant closures that broke Symensma out of this spiral. Without the daily grind of conceptualizing and executing dishes, managing staff and overseeing the business, he was able to finally confront the noise and his anxiety, and accept the fact that death was no longer as imminent as it once seemed. 

“I started having time to think about time,” he says. “I kind of don’t remember most of my 30s; I lied to people through a lot of my 40s … Like, maybe I need to start planning for the future instead of hiding from it.”

Today, Symensma’s cancer scans are clear. His prognosis is good. He ran the Colfax Marathon in May, and he is planning a trip to hike Italy’s Dolomites this August. He no longer has that dark cloud of impending death hanging over his head. 

“I’m comfortable, literally, with my own skin,” he says. “I talk about it a little more openly now. Almost like, ‘Hey, this is what happened’ as opposed to ‘This is what’s happening.’ It’s almost like a memory as opposed to a reality.”

It’s a rebirth of sorts, and one that will soon apply to ChoLon. 

“I think downtown needs sort of a reset,” he says. “We’re going to be doing a remodel here shortly in ChoLon … taking a 16-year-old restaurant and giving it a little bit of a breath of fresh air. Along with that is going to be a full revamp of the menu, sort of reinventing our signature items and just elevating the whole dining experience.”

And that’s just the beginning. Revamping ChoLon, in some ways, is a symbolic effort to plant a new flag in his career at the place where he first pivoted away from his original goals. Now, ChoLon is a starting point for a renewed lease on life without the secrets, lies and hiding. 

“Now that I feel like I’m sort of on the other side of things, I’m looking back at all of those things that I didn’t do, that I didn’t experience, because I was kind of literally scared of my own shadow,” he says. “I want to really push as hard as I can right now … It would be a little bit of a disservice to me and the people around me if we didn’t make a massive push right now, to sort of elevate what we’re doing and get that lost time back, and do something with it.”

ChoLon Bistro is located at 1555 Blake St. and is open from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 3 to 8 p.m. on Sunday, and 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday. For more information, visit cholonconcepts.com.