Los Angeles’ loss is Dallas’ gain: right now, Dallas has L.A.-based chef Shirley Chung, the former Top Chef contestant known to many as the Dumpling Queen, all to itself. Chung closed her L.A. restaurant, Ms. Chai Cafe, following a tongue cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2024. Her new Dallas restaurant, Night Rooster, opens on Saturday, January 31. With her cancer in remission, Night Rooster is Chung’s professional comeback to the kitchen. “I have to relearn how to speak, how to swallow, and using my palate again,” she says.
How Chung ended up as a partner in Night Rooster, a new Chinese restaurant in the Design District with an Italian steakhouse called The Saint just upstairs, is a story years in the making. Chung may be best-known for her reality cooking TV appearances, but for fine dining aficionados, it’s her work with some of the world’s best chefs, including José Andrés, Thomas Keller, and Guy Savoy, that resonates. She got to know Hooper Hospitality founder Andy Hooper when the two worked at Mario Batali’s CarneVino in Las Vegas, around 19 years ago, although they first met a year before that in another job. Chung was CarneVino’s executive sous chef, effectively running the kitchen. “In Vegas, I had a little reputation as a female minority in the kitchen,” Chung says. “I was very tough.” Hooper was the guy the front-of-house team sent to talk to her when anything went wrong in the restaurant. That’s the fast lane to forming a bond in the workplace.
When Chung joined China Poblano, Andrés’ Chinese-Mexican fusion restaurant at the Cosmopolitan, as its executive chef in 2013, she recruited Hooper to be its general manager. He lasted three days. The casual atmosphere with a fast turn to serve 1,500 people a day just didn’t fit. “That was where our friendship became concrete,” Chung says. After she got over being mad at him, she embraced his honesty. Since then, they’ve had a shared joke that they should open a Chinese restaurant together…