The Legacy of Papa Yum
Three generations of legendary restaurateurs.
CHICAGO READER / JULY 2003
A pickup truck pulled up to the curb outside 1541 N. Wells–or as close to the curb as it could get. It was January 1967, and 29 hours of blizzard had buried the city under 23 inches of snow. A tall, lean man two decades removed from the Guangzhou region of China unfolded himself from the cab of the truck and surveyed the condition of his new restaurant, a pizza joint called the Firehouse, which he’d soon rechristen the Golden Dragon. The snowfall had not caved in the roof. It had, however, entombed the doorway, a situation that Papa Yum, as he would come to be known up and down Wells Street, viewed with the detachment of an auditor. Luckily, he’d brought a few of his seven children with him.
Terry Yum, who was 13 years old at the time and would eventually succeed Papa as proprietor of the Golden Dragon, recalls: “When my father pulled up to the restaurant, all you could see was snow, and the top of the light post, and the very tip-top of the buildings.” Papa Yum hustled his brood from the truck—“Everybody out!”—then withdrew from its confines a brace of shovels. “That’s your new restaurant!” he said to his kids, passing each of them a spade. “Now dig it out!”
Terry Yum is now 49, and a picture of him that hangs in the Old Town Ale House portrait gallery gives a fair representation of the man. Despite his Cantonese ancestry, he sports a Fu Manchu mustache. Rose-tinted glasses shade his eyes, his face is as round and contoured as the hills of Guilin, and he is smiling with a wary satisfaction, as if he had just won a bet at your sizable expense. Terry has looked like this since he was a teenager, and so inculcated among the locals is his glasses-mustache aspect that if he were to shave and get contacts no one would recognize him. “My God, that face has seen it all,” says Bruce Elliot, who painted the portrait. “He’s been around, you can tell.”