This Chinese Restaurant Is Livestreaming Its Attempt to Save the Family Business

People love reality TV about struggling restaurants, like Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Confidential and Bar Rescue. 

But Jade Cafe in southwest Denver isn’t inviting any celebrity screamers into its house. Instead, this American-Chinese institution, family owned and operated for 38 years, is hoping avoid landing on the list of restaurant closures by livestreaming its dinner service on TikTok.

It’s all part of a developing master plan led by Phu Nguyen, the third family member to take the reins of the restaurant.

“It just occurred to me that it might be entertaining for people to watch,” he says. “Seeing into the kitchen when an order comes in. What happens when the rush begins. The roar of the burners drowning out the house music. The queue piling up and everyone running around super flustered. It’s bedlam, and I thought it would be entertaining.”

It’s also a sneak peek into a rebirth of sorts for both the restaurant and Nguyen himself. Although he practically grew up in Jade Cafe, which his father opened in 1988, he only assumed management of it this past December. 

As a child, Nguyen helped out after school with whatever was needed on a given day — cooking, wrapping egg rolls, taking deliveries, plumbing, welding, cleaning. You name it, he’s done it. After his brother, Kevin, took over the restaurant in 1998, Nguyen moved on to other pursuits. He graduated from CU Boulder with a chemical engineering degree, moved to Boston, and eventually pivoted to art. 

But when the pandemic hit, he moved back home to help keep the restaurant going in 2020. Now, with his brother getting older, he’s taking on the mantle of the family business full time. 

“I”m just trying to help the family as much as I can,” Nguyen says. “I think my brother’s worked long and hard enough, and I’m trying to get him to a point where he can retire comfortably.”

He’s taken that baton at a particularly difficult time. Increasing costs have impacted the restaurant’s profitability, and it’s been operating in the red. The main cook, a family cousin, needed surgery, and the replacement they hired soon quit.  

So in his short tenure, Nguyen has already had to tap into both his scientific and artistic talents to tackle these and other challenges as they arise. 

His left-brain, so far, has been focused on cost-saving measures and efficiencies implemented over the last few weeks. For instance, he replaced the point of sale system with a self-serve order kiosk that saved not only space and labor, but reduced the credit card fees the prior system charged. He condensed the three phone lines to one. And he’s making the dining area available to clubs and groups for meetings, as well as the walls for other artists to showcase their work. 

As far as the food is concerned, he’s streamlining the menu to find ways to improve the most popular dishes while de-emphasizing the less-ordered items. For instance, popular dishes like crab cheese wontons are made fresh in-house daily, while outliers may be removed from the menu and reserved for the occasional special or “secret menu” orders. 

“I’m a process engineer by heart,” Nguyen says, “so I’m looking at numbers, how long things take to prepare, and what it does to the workflow.”

But he’s also an artist. He painted both wall-sized murals that bookend the small dining area. His TikTok has long focused on videos detailing the process behind his art, as well as the finished pieces themselves, and it is from this artist’s sensibility that the kitchen livestream began.

“I like to tell my followers that it’s not about just the end result,” Nguyen says. “You have to enjoy making mistakes. You have to make thousands of portraits before you actually make the art you want. So I was hoping to capture some of that same process in the restaurant, to chronicle all the ups and downs, and to share that with everybody if they’re willing to look.” 

So far, there seems to be an audience for it. His TikTok videos have gone from getting a few hundred views, to now numbering in the thousands. One post of Nguyen near tears after the cook quit racked up 2,500 views. Another sharing that he had to replace staff with the self-order kiosk got over 20,000 views, and the video announcing the kitchen livestream garnered over 50,000. 

But the livestreams are where the real action takes place. They air nightly from 5 to 7 p.m., for now on Nguyen’s personal account until the Jade Cafe account can reach the 1,000 followers needed to host a livestream. Each session features not only the roar, steam, and bustle of the cooking, but also Nguyen expediting orders, packaging up the food (95 percent of the restaurant’s business is takeout), and providing closeups of each finished dish. 

It’s part food-prep porn and part restaurant process fascination. Hearing an order placed, barked to the cooks, prepared and then plated in the span of about five minutes is a little addictive. Some on the livestream watch the whole process for orders they’ve placed themselves, which provides a certain voyeuristic thrill for others watching it all transpire in real time. 

During lulls, Nguyen will view and address comments/questions from livestream participants, most of whom are local, but the online crowd sometimes includes viewers from other states and countries. Occasionally during service, TikTok fans picking up their to-go order will introduce themselves by their handle name, for an IRL connection. 

Promotional benefits aside, it’s that connection that Nguyen is afteshowcasing the struggles and success of restaurant life to paint a fuller picture of all the decisions and activities that go into a plate of food. And as much as social media can be blamed for too often focusing solely on the finished product, efforts like Nguyen at Jade Cafe show how social media can also be part of the solution. 

“I think it’s great to showcase how delicious your food is, but I think it’s also important to humanize the people who are making the food,” he says. “There’s plenty of food influencers with beautiful pictures, but maybe not enough small business owners sharing what they’re going through and how they’re solving that.”

Jade Cafe is located at 5600 West Dartmouth Avenue and is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and from 3:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit jade.cafe, and follow Phu Nguyen’s TikTok @i.dont.know.seems to catch the livestreams.