The gift of a South Clinton noodle shop

Wong Ming’s family had laid out dumplings, buns, and sticky rice packets for all of us. And “all of us,” included Ming himself. Tradition holds that they set a place for Ming at all meals for seven weeks after his death. The untouched plate is a stark reminder of loss.

Wong Ming, chef and owner of Ming’s Noodles on Clinton Avenue in Rochester since 1998, passed away from gastric cancer on Jan. 5.

Ming’s journey to his South Clinton Avenue noodle shop was anything but direct. Ming, “Larry” to his American customers, was born in Myanmar (formerly Burma) on May 23, 1962, to a Burmese mother and a Chinese father. In 1971, his family moved to Macao, which the Wongs described as “basically Hong Kong, but colonized by the Portuguese rather than the British.” Ming told me in 1999 that he was trying to recreate Hong Kong noodle shops of his youth, probably assuming (correctly) that I didn’t know what Macao was.

Ming’s father came to Rochester in 1979 to work at the Aloha, a kitschy Polynesian restaurant in Brighton. Ming graduated from Brighton High School, and then the story gets picaresque. Perhaps Ming fell in with the wrong sort of people. He went to Seattle in the early 1990s to open a restaurant (Eggroll Palace), then came back and did all sorts of jobs in all sorts of places, driving back and forth from Rochester to Pennsylvania and Maine. He was always working.

Meeting Kelly in 1994 was a watershed. After a couple more years of itinerant work, they bought the little shop on Clinton and opened Ming’s in 1998. Here’s what I said about the restaurant in 1999:

“Ming’s is not a fancy restaurant, and the food isn’t particularly subtle. The flavors tend to center around garlic, a couple varieties of soy sauce, oyster sauce, salt, sugar, chicken stock, and curry powder. But the food is fresh, and the variety of noodles, preparations, and meat choices makes it hard to get bored.”

But Ming’s was better than that description. Ming was the king of autodidacts. Nobody taught him to cook, but he was insatiably curious.

“He would watch, then experiment,” son Andy Wong says. Ming’s daughter, Shirley Wong, adds: “Even on vacation, he was always trying everything.”

Ming watched videos of cooks of all kinds, incessantly checking things out while traveling in Toronto, New York City, and Texas, then experimenting back home. And his palate was impeccable. He seemed to be able to recreate anything he’d tried; as Kelly Wong recalled, “If one ingredient is missing, he knows.”

I live two blocks from the restaurant, so I went, with and without family, all the time, and never ordered off the menu. The deal was that every time he’d make me something he hadn’t before. Sometimes there was a direction: “I feel like seafood,” or “Maybe soup?” And out things came… composed soups with brisket, corn, and fresh noodles; a huge bowl of crayfish; crispy pigs’ ears; jellyfish; dozens of takes on mala dishes; stuffed peppers; whole, deep-fried fish; duck tongues; tofu skins; fish balls; balut (look it up); noodles braised, pan-fried, boiled, seared, cold, and deep-fried. I loved almost every bit of it.

At some point, Mike Bobrow and I started hosting Chinese New Year events at Ming’s. Eight courses, 10 courses—we lost count. And Ming didn’t stick to Chinese food. One night, out came the most perfectly delicate, roasted lamb ribs. After some silent gnawing, I said to a friend, “I think this is the best lamb I’ve ever eaten.” He replied, “I think this is the best food I’ve ever eaten.”

Kelly, Andy, and Shirley Wong repeatedly stressed Ming’s selflessness: Dad making sesame chicken for Andy’s best friend; congee for Kelly. He set up unofficial meal plans for Chinese students from the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology. Many times I’d show up at closing time, and he always fed me with a smile.

“Even the dog!” Shirley Wong says. “He’d cook up filet mignon and give the scraps to the dog!”

Indeed, his selflessness contributed to his dying of cancer in January. He was too busy doing things for others to be bothered, and by the time of his diagnosis, it was too late. When I noted his weight loss, he said, “Too busy to eat!”

When Ming’s opened, the focus on noodles and Ming’s curiosity about the breadth of Asian cooking made it stand out. Local cognoscenti took notice. Over the years, the scene has broadened with copycats (KC Tea & Noodle, Han Noodle Bar) and places with a more specific, regional focus (Tsingtao and Szechuan Opera).

Ming envisioned a Rochester Chinatown in Swillburg. He opened a second location where Crêpe and Go is now, specializing in hot pots. But it’s hard to run two locations and keep the standards up.

In 2018, Kelly and I wondered how often I’d eaten there. Assuming an average of once a week for 19 years, we came up with a number in the high 900s. We counted down to my 1,000th meal, and then we had another party, which Exploring Upstate’s Chris Clemens chronicled here. Ming made, among other things, braised pork hocks that brought to mind my mom’s giant jars of pickled pigs’ feet in our family refrigerator.

He was a bit of a mystic. One night, I was coming down with a cold. I told Kelly, and she told Ming. He made a Chinese medicinal soup with strange, hard little fungi. Kelly warned that it wouldn’t taste great. Out it came, and I ate it (another unspoken part of the deal was that I had to eat whatever he made). I woke up the next day with no hint of a cold. True story.

Food writers get asked all the time, “What’s your favorite restaurant?”

How could I honestly say anywhere but Ming’s? Wong Ming’s absence is a nasty, late-winter pothole in Swillburg. (The restaurant has been remodeled, and the family is looking for a business partner.)

What a gift he and his little noodle shop were.

Adam A. Wilcox is a cook, poet and musician in Rochester. 

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