Honey Bee Asian Bistro Looks to the Past, Present and Future

I love restaurants — I write about them week in and week out. But I also know how tough the industry can be: long, unpredictable hours, low pay, few worker protection  and constant pressure. Even so, restaurants remain one of the few places where immigrants who arrive speaking little English can build a future — not just for themselves, but for their families. That goes for Chinese immigrants trying to establish a life while facing adversity, and the Chinese restaurants they operate.

Honey Bee Asian Bistro & Sushi is one of those stories where the American Dream fights its way through.

Business partners Cindy Chang and Helen Du immigrated from China in their early thirties, looking for a better life for themselves and their children. Today, they run a warm, comforting neighborhood Chinese American restaurant in Aurora that has been serving loyal customers for seventeen years.

Before immigrating to the U.S., Chang worked in a factory cafeteria where she “cooked, did dishes, did everything…washing vegetables, anything that is needed, the entire process. The canteen in the factory had 500 people [to serve] and you had to do so much every day at lunchtime,” she recalls. She met and married her husband in China; he immigrated to New York to make money. Three years later, Chang and her two kids joined him in America.
The entire family worked in restaurants, and Chang quickly joined the family business. “First day, go to America. Second day, go work in the restaurant,” she laughs, remembering. She opened a restaurant in Yonkers, and then the family moved to Pennsylvania for a decade before arriving in Colorado Springs. When Chang’s daughter was accepted into the CU College of Nursing at the Anschutz Medical Campus, Chang moved to Denver with her daughter. When she noticed a Chinese American restaurant down the street, she decided to walk in and ask the owner for a job. That owner was Du, of course. And thus started a partnership that has lasted for nineteen years.

Like Chang, Du immigrated from China when she was 31. However, she came straight to Colorado to join her brother and family. She started work as a dishwasher, working her way up to buffet server, then front-of-house, then owning her own restaurant.

Du eventually sold the restaurant and took a few months' break. Then the opportunity came up to purchase a restaurant in Aurora from owners who wanted to relocate to California. The two friends took over the restaurant together and named it Honey Bee Asian Bistro.

It was tough in the beginning; the restaurant had little name recognition and poor sales. It was also during the 2008 recession when people were cutting back on eating out. There were only four workers, Chang and Du included. But the duo quickly got to work. They focused on “better service, better food. For the kitchen, the food, every dish or the sauce [made by Chang] and we keep it changing to make sure what the customer likes, we do,” explains Du. “And the customers, customers [we treat] like family. So that’s why year by year, every month, every year the sales increase, the business gets better.”

They named the restaurant Honey Bee because honey bees “work tirelessly to build something sweet" for the community. Their priority is to give customers a warm, hospitable experience and delicious food: sesame chicken, orange chicken, Mongolian beef, with cream cheese wontons and egg rolls for appetizers.

Chang does everything from scratch, including “the ingredients, raw materials, sauces, cutting the vegetables every day, making the eggrolls, folding 1,000 dumplings,” Chang says. And Du’s welcoming demeanor and hosting skills have kept families coming back for years. As one person commented on Honey Bee’s Facebook page, “We don’t refer to the name of the restaurant…when we want to go, we ask, ‘Do you want to go to Helen’s?’”

And they’re always improving, well, everything. “The recipes we change frequently. We keep learning based on the original one, and then we make changes at any time based on the feedback from customers,” Chang explains. Twice a year Du sits down and goes through every dish’s sales numbers and ruthlessly cuts low performers. During COVID, they took the PPP money and reinvested it into renovations and hiring robot waiters (a big draw for kids).

After COVID, when they realized people had gotten used to staying in their sweatpants and ordering DoorDash, they hired a sushi chef to encourage more dining in. They saw that this  encouraged larger groups of families, too, as the older generation could order something hot from the kitchen and the younger generation wanted sushi.
The longevity of Honey Bee can definitely be explained by the excellent service and food. But the foundational strength lies in Chang and Du’s enduring partnership. More than business partners, more than friends, they’ve become family. They call each other sister, and their children and grandchildren consider each other one big family. “We respect each other, we respect each’s expertise. This is very important because we have been working together for nineteen years,” Chang says.

Adds Du, “Slowly, slowly we [build] mutual respect and understanding between people. That’s why they call us a golden pair.”

Since its founding, the partners say that Honey Bee has seen steady annual growth of 5 percent; over the years the staff has expanded to twenty. And now they’re in a position to give back to the community that has patronized them for so many years. They support the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, the Dragon Boat Film Festival, the National Martial Arts Academy and Denver Synchronicity Ice Skating programs. They’re also active participants in Denver Restaurant Week and Mile High Asian Food Week, as well as hosts to an annual Lunar New Year Lion Dance performance.

They hope to pass the restaurant on to some of their most loyal employees. “Because we are older, we will gradually retreat to the back. We are training a new generation, training new workers,” explains Chang.

Du wraps a bow on it: “A business cannot just be about the money. This is something we built, we spent seventeen years here, [we cannot] do that without support. So we hope they will step up and keep the business going.”

Honey Bee Asian Bistro & Sushi is located at 18541 East Hampden Avenue, Suite 126, Aurora, and open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday; 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; closed Tuesday; learn more at honeybeeasianbistro.com

This story has been updated to correct Cindy Chang's name.