Career
He was the owner of Johnny Kan"s restaurant, which opened in 1953, and published a book on Cantonese cuisine, Eight Immortal Flavors, which was praised by Craig Claiborne and James Beard. Kan"s restaurant is an early example of a premium restaurant designed around an open kitchen plan so that diners could observe the preparation of food. The concept was popularized in the 1980s.
Its name was frequently on top ten lists of San Francisco restaurants.
World-famous celebrities, movie stars, the rich and the powerful came to Kan"s, and their appearances were written up by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen."(Chinese Historical Society of America, 2013)
The introduction of an innovative version of the Lazy Susan to Chinese restaurants has been attributed to Kan"s: "The trail of the Chinese Lazy Susan finally picks up in the 1950"s, which is when Chinese food got its makeover. The hub of Chinese American cuisine was San Francisco"s Chinatown, where a new generation of entrepreneurial restaurant owners was trying to better adapt Chinese cooking to American tastes.
One of them was Johnny Kan, who opened a Cantonese-style restaurant in 1953. Although Ming"s finally closed in 2014, Kan"s, after more than 60 years, still survives under different ownership.