Tyson Wong Ophaso is the man behind the wok at Chew Man Chu, the modern noodle/dumpling house opening this week in the ground-floor space in the Symphony House at Broad and Pine Streets (215-735-8107).
Ophaso, 37, puts the pan in pan-Asian. He identifies himself as a Laotian-born Thai whose mother, a retired college professor, is Thai and Chinese and father is of Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian ancestry. His father, a French-educated engineer for Shell Oil, uprooted the family frequently. When Ophaso was 14, he says, he stayed in France while resisting the family's planned return to Asia. That's where he learned kitchen work from the bottom up with such masters as Pierre Troisgros and Paul Bocuse before he wound up in New York under Daniel Boulud, then with Andre Soltner, and then with Claude Troisgros, followed by seven years with Jean-Jacques Rachou.