Ace Chinese Restaurant offers pho noodle soup with chicken, beef or crawfish options.[/caption]After more than 30 years in business in The Woodlands, Ace Chinese Restaurant moved to Magnolia this spring for a fresh start in a new community.
“The Woodlands was getting congested, and the rent was too expensive,” co-owner Susan Quan said. “The space was too big, so we downsized to something more manageable.”
Now located along FM 2978, Quan said the restaurant’s relocation in March has not deterred regular customers, but she has seen an increase in new patrons.
“People in Magnolia are very friendly,” she said. “It’s exciting for me because I can start getting to know our customers again. New faces and old faces—it’s those two combined that make it great.”
Despite a change in scenery, Quan said the restaurant has remained a family operation. Her husband and co-owner, Tommy Quan, works in the kitchen as the head chef, and her mother-in-law, Alice Quan, helps cook and prepares dishes.
“For us it’s family-oriented and it’s fun,” Quan said. “We joke around and it’s not so much a [formal] business type of thing.”
Ace Chinese offers lunch and dinner menus with classic Asian-American dishes, such as orange chicken, dumplings and kung pao beef. Quan said although her husband does much of the cooking for customers, the restaurant recently hired sous-chef David Wong to bring new ideas to the menu.
“I think they’re a really good team,” she said. “We haven’t changed [the menu] a lot, but [while the new location was being built] we were able to eat out a lot and look for inspiration for new recipes.”
In addition to the lunch and dinner menus, Quan said Ace Chinese offers delivery, catering and special orders for customers wanting more traditional Chinese fare.
“Customers can call us, and we’ll go pick up the items fresh from the Chinatown area,” Quan said. “We can do whole steamed fish and the whole Beijing duck—special dishes [that are] a little more authentic.”
Although it may be easy for restaurants to become caught up in competition, Quan said a focus on quality has helped Ace Chinese maintain its success over the past three decades.
“You really have to enjoy and love what you do instead of treating it as just a job,” Quan said. “That sets us apart from other restaurants, and it shows in our customer service and our cooking.”
