Madras Day Week: Inside Liu’s Waldorf, one of Chennai’s last surviving Chinese-run restaurants

Liu’s Waldorf is among Chennai’s last surviving Chinese restaurants. Sit down for a meal with the family of Chinese origin that has cooked for the city for 46 years

Our story begins in the 1970s, at IIT-Kharagpur, where Ken Liu, founder of Liu’s Waldorf, is helping set up his brother-in-law’s restaurant. The Chinese joint, also called Waldorf, turned out to be popular among the students, and a chance-meeting with an IIT professor helped Ken realise the prospects of a thriving restaurant business in then Madras, a city slowly warming up to a cosmopolitan character. Could he replicate this success? In 1974, when Ken moved to Madras, he would find that the answer was yes. Adyar, which was bustling with student crowds from the nearby institutions such as IIT-Madras and Anna University, became a hotspot for business and before he knew it, Liu’s Waldorf was a hit. It certainly was not the first Chinese restaurant in the city, since Mount Road at least had three: Chungking, Nanking and Southern Chinese. But it was the only Chinese joint in the Adyar, Besant Nagar and Taramani area.