The fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar commemorates the end of the fall harvest, with celebrants lighting lanterns and exchanging mooncakes—decorative filled pastries. This year the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 17, and at Jeng Chi restaurant, preparations began many months ago.
Tucked away in the suburb of Richardson, just twenty minutes north of Dallas, Jeng Chi has an unassuming strip mall exterior that gives way to a vast kitchen, where a team of five makes hundreds of mooncakes by hand every morning in the four months leading up to the festival season. At the head of the assembly line, Yuan and Mei Teng, who own the restaurant, oversee quality control.
The Tengs’ mooncakes have called three continents home. Yuan’s father founded the original Jeng Chi in 1940s Taiwan. The couple eventually left Taiwan in 1970 for São Paulo, Brazil, where they worked in bakeries and raised their son, Francisco, who now co-owns Jeng Chi with his parents. They moved to Dallas in the eighties and opened Jeng Chi there in 1990.
Today Jeng Chi is one of the Metroplex’s most popular Chinese restaurants, serving lunch and dinner dishes such as its signature soup dumplings and crispy duck. But making mooncakes is lucrative enough that the endeavor warrants its own stand-alone website. Last year the Tengs saw about five thousand orders.
Customers can choose between northern-style cakes, crunchy with a tender interior; flaky, onion-like “thousand-layer” cakes; and popular Cantonese-style mooncakes. The most famous variety of mooncake worldwide, that last type is chewy in texture and filled with traditional flavors like rich lotus-seed paste or red bean paste. Some sweeter, more unique flavor options include coconut, passion fruit, and coffee walnut rum raisin. A minimum order of eight mooncakes (two boxes) is required for delivery, but in the restaurant, diners can purchase the mooncakes individually or opt to fill a box. Though the date of the Mid-Autumn Festival changes each year, the year’s first mooncake is usually sold in mid-July.
At 9 a.m. on a late-summer Tuesday, Yuan rolls dough made from all-purpose flour, sugar, soybean oil, lemon, and egg into perfect cylinders before slicing those into malleable mounds. Pastry chef Guadalupe Joaquin then rubs them pancake flat so Mei can press in the filling of chocolate with chunks of candied lemon. Francisco and pastry chef Hong Li finally squeeze them into “knockers”—wooden molds—and beat the molds against the counter to release the cakes, which come out with scalloped edges and intricate petal designs on top.
It takes about two hours to produce two hundred mooncakes, not including the month-long lead time to make ingredients like salted duck egg yolks for the fillings. The Tengs’ craftsmanship is a vanishing art. “No one does it by hand like this anymore,” Francisco laments. “Even these knockers—we have to get them made by older people in Taiwan. When I go there to get them, I order extra. The quality’s going down, and we don’t even know if some of those people are alive anymore.”
But for the Tengs, doing things the hard way is the only way. Yuan, who is approaching ninety, still insists on rising at three in the morning to lead ingredient preparation and ensure maximum freshness.
“What I have is an obligation toward the tradition, the craft,” he says simply. “And when I’m late by one hour, everyone else is late, too.”
The story of how mooncakes came to symbolize the Mid-Autumn Festival goes like this: Chinese myth has it that the arrows of skilled archer Hou Yi shot down nine of the ten suns that existed thousands of years ago, sparing Earth from hellish heat. According to one popular version of the tale, when Hou’s student tried to steal his reward of an immortality elixir, Hou’s wife, Chang’e, consumed it instead and flew alone to the moon. An earthbound and heartbroken Hou watched for her shadow in the moon before displaying her favorite snacks as offerings for his moon goddess. The mother of the moon then allowed Hou and Chang’e to reunite on what has become the Mid-Autumn Festival. The traditions that honor this legend are now practiced and enjoyed by many who are not culturally Chinese.
“I am a longtime customer of Jeng Chi, but only tried their mooncakes for the first time last year,” says Paige Hughes, who shares neighborhood goings-on via her Instagram account, the Richardson Paige. “And I loved mine so much that I immediately marked my calendar to get one again the next fall.”
As more people learn about the Mid-Autumn Festival and celebrate it with their communities, the Jeng Chi team members sees it as their responsibility to teach new customers about these ancient traditions.
“We’re bridging a gap,” Francisco says. “We can’t change traditions, but we can reeducate and introduce Americans to mooncakes. We don’t want them to think of mooncakes as the cheap ones from the grocery store, so, yes, we do it the hard way.”
The “cheap” cakes in question are stocked at any Asian grocery store come August, gift wrapped for convenient exchanging. As delicacies go, however, they’re often begrudgingly enjoyed out of formality. “In a way, mooncakes are like American fruitcakes. No one buys those to eat—they’re for gifting,” Francisco says. “Our mooncakes are for eating, though. We even ship outside of Texas to people who say, ‘Can you send these to New York for my sister? To L.A.?’ Because these people who’ve had our stuff know it’s real.”
At Jeng Chi, the Tengs have perfected the mooncake, and they have Dallasites—Chinese and otherwise—clamoring for their seasonal treats.
