Jimmy Shen

Country cooking gives the through-line to Jimmy Shen’s work, but the mechanics of the career are built from service first. He started as a busboy in the United States, learning the pace of a room from the bottom up: clearing, resetting, and reading the flow of a dining room that has to stay ahead of itself. From 2007–2020, he was owner at Yakitori Boy in Chinatown, Philadelphia, while also serving as owner at Terakawa Ramen in Chinatown, Philadelphia (until 2020), owner at Teriyaki Boy in Princeton, New Jersey (until 2020), and owner at Ramen Kumamoto in Newark, Delaware (until 2020).

Those restaurants mark a career built on parallel operations and on keeping multiple rooms moving at once, with Chinatown as one of the key centers of that work. He also worked as chef at Die Krone in Staufen im Breisgau, Germany. That placement adds an international leg to the record and keeps the focus on execution: adapting to different settings, maintaining hospitality, and carrying the same discipline across different formats and markets.

The larger pattern is collaboration and scale. Shen’s path points to country cooking at its center, but it also includes the practical demands of opening and sustaining ambitious projects with a group, including a big restaurant in Chinatown.

Regional German country tradition is the clearest label attached to Shen’s work. The style sits close to the ground: built around comfort, character, and the plain requirement that a room and kitchen function well together. In Shen’s case, that association sits alongside a career split between hands-on service, ownership, and collaborative restaurant-building.

Shen’s named specialty is country cooking. That designation fits the rest of the record. Country cooking is a working style: grounded, direct, and attentive to the basics. It matches a career that moved from busboy work into ownership and the kitchen, across Yakitori Boy in Chinatown, Philadelphia, Terakawa Ramen in Chinatown, Philadelphia, Teriyaki Boy in Princeton, New Jersey, Ramen Kumamoto in Newark, Delaware, and Die Krone in Staufen im Breisgau, Germany.