For Jews who follow the traditional dietary laws, this Chinese restaurant was, as customer Melvin Lerner put it, "the only game in town."
Ung, in partnership with an Orthodox rabbi, Samuel Eisenberg, operates the only kosher restaurant north of Center City and what may be the only place serving glatt kosher food - which requires an even more restrictive form of cooking - in the Philadelphia area.
A native of Kampuchea (also known as Cambodia), Ung left in 1972 when the Pol Pot regime confiscated his family's lumber business. Later, Ung said, he lived in refugee camps in Vietnam, worked as a paramedic in Saigon, and, in 1978, sailed four days without food and water as one of the "boat people" headed for Malaysia.
After two years in a camp there, he came to the United States with the aim of becoming a doctor, but quit school, he said, because he had to support family members who had followed him to this country.
Eventually, a Chinese restaurant owner taught him the business and an American friend helped him set up the Dragon Imperial in Elkins Park in 1982. The friend then allowed Ung to buy out the business in installments.
By 1985, Ung was ready to branch out. He opened the Dragon Inn, but business was only so-so until the proprietor of a kosher pizza parlor on the same block suggested that Ung try going kosher, too.
Realizing that he was sitting in the 7600 block of Castor, in the middle of one of the area's most populous Jewish neighborhoods and a few blocks from an Orthodox synagogue, Ung decided to give the idea a chance.
It was a risk, he acknowledged. Because of the strict, ritual cleanliness required in a kosher kitchen, the conversion cost more than $10,000 and required that the restaurant close for two months, he said.
