Tony Hu

The Path

Technique and regional identity came first at The Culinary Institute of Sichuan in 1989, where Tony Hu's training gave the work its initial discipline. By 1993, that grounding had carried into Chicago, where he worked as special technician chef and began adapting the language of Sichuan cooking for a different market. The line tightened in 1998, when he became founder and owner of Lao Sze Chuan, establishing the restaurant that would define much of his professional life.

The Work Today

Since founding Lao Sze Chuan in 1998, Hu has stayed attached to the restaurant as founder, and since 2015, he has also held the role of owner. Those dates point to continuity rather than a single arrival: the same Chicago address, the same repeated work of holding flavor, method, and identity in place. The present-tense value of the work is in that continuity. There is no posture of reinvention for its own sake. The career reads as a steady effort to keep a cuisine legible, vivid, and recognizably itself. His own words keep the standard open rather than sealed: "Success... Not yet. Still working hard on these parts, but I like to do things." Set against the sequence of 1989 training, 1993 work in Chicago, 1998 founding, and 2015 ownership, the line reads as process over finish.

Signature

Tony Hu's work centers on authentic Chinese restaurants and authentic Sichuan dishes. The point is plain: a restaurant can serve as both a business and a carrier for cuisine, presenting the food with clarity rather than compromise.

In Their Words “Success... Not yet. Still working hard on these parts, but I like to do things.”

Acclaim

Recognition follows the cuisine he brought into Chicago. Beginning with the 1998 founding of Lao Sze Chuan, Hu's name became linked to authentic Sichuan cooking in a city where Canton cuisine had largely held sway. The acknowledgment here is tied to a specific change in presence. A restaurant became a reference point, and a chef trained at The Culinary Institute of Sichuan in 1989 became associated with the sustained visibility of authentic Sichuan flavors in Chicago. That is the enduring shape of the record: training in Sichuan, building a restaurant from 1998 onward, and taking ownership in 2015 while continuing to center the cuisine that first defined the work.