[3] Joyce Chen was born in Beijing, the youngest of nine children of a high-ranking Qing dynasty official, during the Republican era under Sun Yat-sen.[4] Her wealthy father, a railroad administrator and city executive, could afford to hire a family cook.

In 1957, she first thought that her cooking might be popular when she made pumpkin cookies and Chinese egg rolls for a bake sale fundraiser at the Buckingham School in Cambridge.

[8] According to her son, Stephen, here she pioneered the all-you-can-eat Chinese dinner buffet to boost sales on otherwise-slow Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

[5][10] For Chinese-speaking and English-speaking staff and customers to communicate more easily, Chen introduced the practice of numbering menu items.

Now a single mother with three children, she managed to open a second restaurant in 1967, called The Joyce Chen Small Eating Place.

Chen's son, Stephen, later noted that the opening of this restaurant changed the landscape of the Central Square area in Cambridge.

According to Stephen Chen, it was at this restaurant that his mother introduced the Northern style of dim sum, and the now popular "soup dumplings" (shao long bao).

In 1969, Chen opened her third restaurant,[17] a much larger space seating 500 people, in an existing building located at 500 Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

[18] In 1973, Chen opened her fourth restaurant in an elegant Modernist custom-designed building at 390 Rindge Avenue, near Fresh Pond.

[8] The building, designed by Alan Ahakian, was described as "marvelously secluded behind a baffled garden wall that focuses around a single tree".

[14] Chen was a warm hostess who formed relationships with many guests, including John Kenneth Galbraith, James Beard, Julia Child, Henry Kissinger, Beverly Sills, and Danny Kaye.

[24] Twenty-six episodes were filmed on the same set as The French Chef (featuring Julia Child) in the studios of WGBH in Boston.

[25] The two programs were both produced by Ruth Lockwood, and the basic studio kitchen setup was superficially redecorated in an "oriental" motif.

[7][14] Chen's cooking show aired widely across the US, and eventually in the United Kingdom and Australia; eleven of these original programs can still be seen on the WGBH website.

[7] She would later be criticized for adapting and simplifying recipes for American tastes, although she pioneered in an era when few viewers had access to authentic Chinese ingredients and flavors.

[citation needed] Chen lacked the informal, casual English-language fluency of Julia Child, and spent hours with voice coaches carefully trying to improve her pronunciation.

He would return from the family trip with plenty of footage, which was used in the majority of a documentary, co-produced with Ruth Lockwood, which was aired nationally on PBS as Joyce Chen's China in May 1973.

[28] Chen suffered a serious injury to her right hand in 1976, when she dropped a large glass jar that contained her stir fry sauce.

From her landmark restaurant in the Boston area to her cookbooks and trailblazing PBS television show, Chen invited newcomers to sample unfamiliar dishes in ways that firmly established Chinese cuisine in the United States.

She was succeeded by daughter Helen Chen, herself a chef and cookbook author, as chief executive officer of the company, Joyce Chen Inc.[38] Youngest son Stephen became in charge in running the restaurant operations, while Helen concentrated on managing the specialty foods and cookware businesses.

In 1999, the former restaurant was re-opened, this time as a childcare facility, while the remainder of the lot on Rindge Avenue was filled with residential housing.

[23] In January 2020, Columbian Home Products, the distributor of the "Joyce Chen", "Keilen" and "Origins" cookware brands since 2003, closed its plant in Terre Haute, Indiana and laid off its remaining 82 employees.

Over time, the line has been expanded to include gluten-free, certified kosher, and lower-sodium foods, none of which have added MSG content.

[50] Eldest son Henry and his wife Barbara (née Castagnoli) owned and managed Joyce Chen Unlimited, a retail store in Acton, Massachusetts, which closed in March 2008, five months after his death.