Egg Roll Memories

James Beard Finalist Penelope Wong’s Journey To Yuan Wonton Began In Her Family’s Kitchen 

By Mollie Barnes
For the GPHN

For Chef Penelope Wong, many childhood memories revolve around the food her family prepared. 

Her parents owned a Cantonese restaurant in the North Denver area while she was growing up. Rather than playing with her cousins, she said she would find herself in the kitchen learning to cook from her aunties and grandparents. At her family’s restaurant, she helped her father between lunch and dinner services with prep work, gaining more responsibilities as she grew older. 

“I preferred to be in the kitchen, learning the wok station, fry station, and eventually when I was 16, I was able to run my dad’s kitchen by myself,” Wong said. “Food’s always been an imperative part of my life.”

After graduating college, Wong began working in the kitchen at the Glenmore Country Club in Cherry Hills. Four years later, she became its youngest and first female executive chef. Twenty years after that, Wong said she wanted a change in lifestyle.

“[The food truck] was something I wanted to do that would help create some work life balance, to keep me in this industry and, most importantly, it was about cooking the foods that I wanted to cook and I wanted to share,” she said. 

In 2023, Wong and her team opened a brick and mortar restaurant, sharing the space with Sweets and Sourdough (plus a third vendor that no longer operates in the space). Yuan Wonton, at 28th and Fairfax, is open for lunch Tuesday through Fridays and for happy hour on Thursdays and Fridays. 

The restaurant’s interior is minimalistic, with the focus on a small menu of specialties, including Wong’s signature OG Chile Oil Wontons. Much of the menu changes daily. The restaurant is generally packed, and Wong remains in the center of the action in the kitchen turning out made-from-scratch Asian-fusion dishes.

Early this year, she was recognized for her years of work in kitchens: She was named a James Beard finalist in 2024 for Best Mountain Chef.

Also this year, Wong started holding monthly supper clubs with guest chefs. In a collaboration with her lead line cook, Caroline Zubiake, the restaurant hosts Chifa dinners — a culinary tradition merging Chinese and Peruvian flavors. 

“A lot of the concepts and the menu are the foods I grew up with in my parents’ Cantonese restaurant, mixed with the flare of the Peruvian touch,” she said. 

Every day in the restaurant, Wong said, she is reminded of being in the kitchen with her family. 

“It’s little things . . . it’s menu items, using specific knives, cleavers, cutting certain vegetables a certain way,” she said. “There’s a ton of different nuances in our day-to-day that always brings me back.” 

One menu item, “Dad’s Egg Rolls,” is a staple on Yuan Wonton’s menu. Wong said that she has never found another Chinese Cantonese restaurant in which the egg rolls reminded her of her dad’s, so she started making them herself. She found herself describing the process the exact way she had been taught. 

“When I was first training my staff on how to do it, those were the words that were coming out of my mouth,” Wong said. 

“I was like ‘oh my god, I sound just like my grandpa.’”