Ken Gene, now the owner of Gene’s Restaurant, was eight years old when his father Larry and mother Rae opened up the Stratford favourite.
“From day one I was washing dishes,” Gene laughed. “When we opened up, I made $1 a day, made seven bucks a week. … My mother used to tell the whole story that I'd be washing dishes and I'd be asking mom, ‘When’s break time?’ ”
Gene’s Restaurant was started in 1970, originally located at 38 Erie St., before moving to its current location at 81 Ontario St. in 1975.
“Myself, my brother, we grew up in the restaurant,” Gene recounted. “We would go to school, we'd come to the restaurant for lunch and then go back to school, and even come back over during the evening. And then we would eat here and then we would leave with my mother. My dad would stick around and keep on working.”
Though there were other Chinese restaurants such as the Golden Bamboo and the Commodore, in Stratford at the time, Gene didn’t characterize it as competition.
“There was no conflict,” he said. “It was still a busy industry back then.” Now, 54 years later, Gene is still working in the back room, having graduated from dishwasher to chef and owner. As he explained, he learned to start packing takeout orders and then helped his mother prep and even made the plum sauce, which he still does.
His father, Larry, ran the restaurant until he was 70 years old when Gene took over in 2004.
As he shared in a Facebook post on the restaurant’s page, he had asked to take over when he was 34 and his father said no, saying he wasn’t old enough. Gene describes the restaurant as an “old-school chop suey” restaurant with approximately 135 items on the menu, something which isn’t as prevalent today as it was back in the day.
“Nobody has these lamps,” he said, gesturing to the lamps suspended from the ceiling. “My father said, ‘Why don’t we try and modernize and get rid of these lamps and be more like some of these newer Toronto type Chinese restaurants.’ And I thought, no. That’s what we are. … For a long time, customers would come in and say, ‘This is old and gaudy.’ And now we’re kind of retro.”
Diners can see how retro the restaurant is now that the dining room is back open. On June 7, after having the dining room closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gene reopened his doors for limited hours in honour of the restaurant’s 54th anniversary that was officially celebrated on June 6. Takeout has remained popular, Gene said, but he had heard from customers that they had missed the atmosphere of the restaurant and it seemed now was a good time to reopen the dining room, considering many dining rooms in Stratford have shut their doors.
“I thought in my head, it’s no problem. It’ll be easy,” Gene admitted. “Because, in my mind, I’ve done it for 50 years.” There were some hiccups, Gene said, but overall it was a great experience with staff making the transition from being takeout focused to dine-in servers – no easy feat considering it was the first dinner service for many of them. Gene, now 62, is nearing the same age his father was when he stepped down.
Not wanting to burn out, he is unsure if he will continue as long as his father did in the kitchen, though he said that he is happy to keep it going in the near future.
Connor Luczka is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter for the Stratford Times, and the LJI is funded by the federal government.
