Wee Fong Ehlers calmly plops a preportioned container of mushrooms, chopped carrots, and cabbage into her sizzling wok, unaware of the iPad screen glowing red behind her or the customer waiting at the register outside.
“Mama!” exclaims Alex Ehlers from his post as cashier, skidding past a table stocked with Justin’s peanut butter cups, roast beef sandwiches, and $12 fruit juices to enter Ehlers’s universe: the kitchen at Royal Blue Grocery, an upscale corner store, on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin. “There’s an order from yesterday morning. Are you gonna talk to him?”
It’s the mid-lunch rush. Ehlers nods to her 21-year-old son and quickly prepares a to-go container with stewed beef, coconut rice, and cucumbers, adding a complimentary Thai green tea to the order as a peace offering. Despite the chaos, she remains composed and heads straight to the customer. She apologizes for the delay, explaining a mix-up with his online order, which came in while the restaurant was closed. He reassures her it’s no problem.
“When I have stress, I just take a deep breath, get it over easy,” says sixty-year-old Ehlers, the eye within her own storm of popularity. “My mind is all food, all the business.”
Last September, the New York Times named Ehlers’s cafe, Wee’s Cozy Kitchen (then located within the Foodie’s Corner convenience store attached to a Shell gas station near the University of Texas campus), one of the fifty best restaurants in the country. The following months saw a whirlwind of media coverage and an exponential surge in business—and the sudden onslaught of attention posed great challenges to Ehlers and her tiny, self-made shop.
First Ehlers lost her home base. Foodie’s management kicked the chef out for inadvertently clogging the parking lot with customers, according to Ehlers. “They say I’m so unique for cooking fine dining in a gas station, and then they make me leave,” she says, laughing heartily and throwing up her hands in mock resignation.
She had no contingency plans. It hadn’t been Ehlers’s dream to open a restaurant, let alone to become so successful that she’d overwhelm her landlord.
Ehlers remembers the first time a food critic tasted her authentic Malaysian cuisine. Elazar Sontag dressed in average clothes and sat eating quietly, never hinting he’d arrived from Bon Appétit magazine. “I don’t know how he found me,” Ehlers says. “I never predicted that I would get famous.”
Growing up in Malaysia, Ehlers did not think about cooking. She moved to the U.S. in 1999 and learned to prepare food at a private UT dorm. When a coworker proposed in 2021 that they open a Tex-Mex restaurant at Foodie’s, Ehlers agreed, just to try something new.
One evening, Ehlers’s friend came to her newly opened restaurant with a strong craving for Malaysian food, and Ehlers cooked something for him. Slowly, she perfected the cuisine she’d eaten growing up, distinguishing the ideal shade of red for curry and learning that organic ginger smells best. She split up the kitchen with her former partner: tacos in the morning; Wee’s Cozy Kitchen at night.
After Ehlers was asked to leave the gas station in December 2023, George Scariano, co-owner of Royal Blue Grocery, saw Ehlers’s potential and welcomed her. Three months after losing her lease at Foodie’s, Ehlers reopened Wee’s Cozy Kitchen at Royal Blue’s Congress Avenue location.
“I was quite surprised [that Foodie’s asked Ehlers to leave], and with fingers crossed, I reached out to her via Instagram,” Scariano says. “Ehlers is a force of nature, and I feel honored to be her partner.”
Ehlers hung media clippings around the cash register. Royal Blue staff cut out images of her—sporting a pristinely white chef’s coat and a jubilant grin—to display on the store’s refrigerators. The real Ehlers wears a black apron stained with sauces and that same smile, despite the ongoing challenges of running her restaurant.
Since the New York Times article, Ehlers has faced the predicament of success: she’s grateful for the boom but struggles to keep up with the number of orders—around a thousand each day, and counting. She’s working to expand the menu, but it’s challenging for her to manage the buying and preparation of all the ingredients on top of cooking each meal. Once she takes the time to hire a large staff she can count on, Ehlers says, she’ll finally relax. At least a little.
“I recognize this is a good restaurant, but I still have to keep working to catch up,” Ehlers says. “I try my best to control my health, physical and mental. I put one footstep in front of the other.”
When her assistant cook arrives two hours late, Ehlers lets it slide. It’s difficult for her to find chefs she trusts with her intricate, authentic dishes, so she’s grateful for any support she can get.
Ehlers’s husband, Daniel, helps carry heavy equipment and grocery loads, and her son, Alex, who studies business at Austin Community College, works at his mom’s restaurant every hour he’s not in school. He’s either at the register, bookkeeping, helping plate dishes, taking out the trash, or fixing the broken sink. “I couldn’t do it without him,” Ehlers says.
Yelp reviewers previously commented that the rendang (a stewed beef or tofu dish) was too dry and “inauthentic,” even though Ehlers cooks it as she remembers eating it in Malaysia. Ehlers says she knows people aren’t trying to be mean; some have just left unflattering reviews without learning her background and story.
“I don’t want people to just taste my food; I want them to understand it,” says the cook who treats every customer as if they were at her kitchen table. Or a Bon Appétit writer in disguise.
When a group of tourists from Denver sits outside eating the wing platter (a giant dish of chicken wings with Malaysian sambal sauce), Ehlers runs to the table to ask if the visitors are enjoying their meals and if the wings have enough seasoning. The customers respond with smiles and laughs, assuring Ehlers that her cooking tastes exquisite.
“You have to always be kind to everybody, always do the right thing,” Ehlers says. “You never know who is a food blogger.”
