Tong was born in China and eventually came to the United States for college. During that time, she cooked for her friends at school and went back to Chengdu for the summers to work as a translator in her mother’s restaurant. A friend insisted she start watching some new television programs, and after streaming an episode of a food show that featured the chef Wylie Dufresne, Tong applied to a culinary school and hoped to extern at his restaurant, WD-50, which in time she did. She worked for him, and for other chefs, for years, all the while revising ideas for her own restaurant.
Tong is from Sichuan, but many of the flavors at Little Tong have roots in nearby Yunnan, a vast and diverse province, scattered with small family farms. Tong spent months there last year Airbnb-hopping, getting around through China’s ride-sharing app, Didi Chuxing, asking everyone she met, ‘‘What’s good?’’
In every town, there was a different answer: tarts filled with flower petals, eggs scrambled with young ferns, fresh cow’s-milk cheese dabbed with rose jam, beautiful dry-cured hams, marbled with fat. Tong tried mushroom varieties she didn’t have the words for, picked tea leaves to roast and realized it would be impossible to precisely replicate the food of the region back in New York. Instead she improvised, building the flavors of Yunnan into her menu like a guiding principle. ‘‘I wouldn’t say what I do is authentic,’’ she said, ‘‘and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that’s what I’m trying to do.
