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Sylvia Wu, whose famous Southern California restaurant has attracted Hollywood’s biggest stars for 40 years, has died at the age of 106, according to news reports.
Lady Wu Gardens on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica became a dining venue shortly after opening in 1959, popular for its food and pagoda-style décor, including jade statues, stone waterfalls, and koi-filled fountain.
Ms. Wu herself, known for wearing floor-length silk robes, occasionally greets Tinseltown’s elite and sometimes picks up the phone to take takeaway orders.
She died on September 19, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
Ms Wu said she was from China and opened the restaurant when she found only heavy imitation Cantonese food.
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“There are chops everywhere,” she complained to USA TODAY. “All you see is a shack house.”
In Mrs. Wu’s garden, Mae West likes cold melon soup, Gregory Pike and Paul Newman prefer shrimp toast and crab puffs, and the Princess of Monaco prefers Peking duck, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“Everyone in this town knows Ms. Wu,” the late TV host Merv Griffin once told the paper. “One of the dearest, sweetest, most elegant women I’ve ever known.”
After closing the restaurant in 1998, she immediately regretted her decision and opened Madame Wu’s Asian Bistro and Sushi. That restaurant didn’t last long, but the feelings for Mrs. Wu persisted. In 2014, when she turned 100, her regular clients filled the hotel ballroom for her birthday party.
Born Sylvia Cheng on October 24, 1915, and raised in Jiujiang, a city southwest of Shanghai, she learned to cook while watching maids prepare meals for the wealthy family.
The family moved to Shanghai and then to Hong Kong. During World War II, she traveled to New York City on an ocean liner.
“I don’t know how I got up the courage,” she later recalled. “I don’t have family in the US. The trip took 40 days and the power went out all the way because of the war.”
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While studying for a degree in education at Columbia University, she met the successful chemist Yan Wuwang. They married, had three children, and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in engineering at Hughes Aircraft, and she became a restaurateur.
She also writes cookbooks, appears regularly on TV, and is active in charity work, especially at the City of Hope Cancer Center after her daughter Loretta died of breast cancer at age 34.
Wu’s sons, George and Patrick, and many grandchildren survive, according to the Los Angeles Times. Her husband died in 2011. The two have been married for 67 years.
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