Lona’s Lil Eats

The front windows of Lona’s Lil Eats are a microcosm for Lona herself and her restaurant. Bright, turquoise blue highlights the siding, through which several green plants can be spotted behind curved, orange and pink lettering announcing the name of the establishment. Inside, curtains frame the massive floor-to-ceiling glass, through which light bounces off the wooden flooring. The curtains are a royal blue and white tie-dye pattern, a traditional art form of Dali, located in Lona’s hometown province of Yunnan, China. The tie-dye creates butterflies, leaves, and vines in white against a blue background, two colors representing the beauty in simplicity. It is in Yunnan where Lona learned to live simply as a villager, where she learned to cook and gained a passion for food, and where she met her husband Pierce. Not long after getting married and having their first child, the pair relocated to St. Louis, Pierce’s hometown. When I ask her about this major life decision she made 10 years ago, Lona shrugs because she didn’t think much about it. Moving here at 29-years-old, she lived lightly, always go-go-going.

I first ate at Lona’s restaurant a few years ago and was intrigued by the individual behind the photos I saw on the wall--a collage under a handwritten label: “Lona’s Home :).” The photos show a valley with lush, green forest and mud houses. The Chinese people photographed are all thin and range from babies in arms to people wearing straw hats to herding cattle to eating food to elderly women in blue hats and matching blue tops to men with unbuttoned white shirts, smoking out of a large pipe. My interest in Yunnan province emerged when I travelled to its capital, Kunming, last year when I visited my cousin there. I was pleasantly surprised to find some of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever tried, such as fried rice served in a pineapple, a nod to Thai cuisine. Browsing the Lona’s website one day, I learned that she was from Yunnan and knew that I had to talk to her because I had so many questions about her background and her experience starting her restaurant. 

Lona’s first year in St. Louis was difficult. An early job was working at a Japanese restaurant, where the owners generally didn’t show concern for their employees. She worked there for two years before overhearing a conversation between the owners about taking everyone’s tips. After doing the calculations, she realized that they had taken 40% of her tips that day. She was shocked and hurt: “I really don’t care about money. I just work. I thought if you use your heart, people use their heart for you.” Starting her own restaurant had been in the back of her mind at the time, but this incident spurred her to quit and actually do it. 

She began by operating a stand at the Soulard Farmers Market near downtown St. Louis, selling platters and giant rice paper wraps with grains, greens, protein, and sauce mixed together in a fusion of flavors influenced by Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Burmese cuisines. Yunnan is located just north of these other countries, which is one reason the province has unique food. Another reason for its distinctiveness are all the minority groups that live there. In China, there are 56 ethnic minorities; 92% of the 1.4 billion people are Han Chinese, while the remaining fall in the other 55 groups. Yunnan is home to 51 of these 55 groups, making it the most ethnically diverse. Lona’s cooking style emerges from this region, where food is generally spicy and utilizes mushrooms and flowers. Lona’s food is both fresh and delicious, featuring sides such as spicy eggplant and stir-fried glass noodles and sauce options including Spicy Sesame, Lona-Q, Lemongrass Pesto, Smoked Vinaigrette, and Lime-Ginger Peanut. After gaining a following of health-conscious customers, she decided to open a physical space. With little money, she and Pierce bought a house in a residential area of Fox Park and turned the bottom floor into what is now Lona’s Lil Eats, while they live upstairs with their 15-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. This location has now been around for three-and-a-half years and sees such a constant flow of business that upon entering at a slow moment, one customer asks, “Are you closed? I’ve never seen it this empty!” 

After the story about her former bosses at the Japanese restaurant, Lona looks over at the windowsill and points to a purple orchid, recounting the time they came to congratulate her success, gifting a similar orchid. She accepted their praise and even gave them a free meal. However, she was sure to tell them, “The food is on the house. But tip my workers whatever you wanna tip. I don’t order anybody to tip my workers. If you’re happy, tip them. They get everything. You don’t care about your workers; I care about my workers. In here, you have to tip them.” In the front window hangs a poster stating, “We Pay the Fair Wage,” in the red, blue, and yellow colors of the St. Louis flag, emphasizing her point. Despite her open, friendly demeanor, Lona knows how to stand up for herself. 

Lona has a sweet-tough look to her. On this particular day, she’s wearing her usual jeans and t-shirt combination. She’s also sporting a baseball cap, which resembles a hunting cap because of the deer symbol on it, except that it’s pastel pink. She has an easy smile and loves to laugh. Her tan skin is a result of spending ample time outside, sometimes chatting with customers on one of the six picnic tables outside, whose tops are painted the same vibrant teal color as the windowsill. The first time I come to talk to Lona, she is sitting next to a family; when she sees me, she instantly stands up and gives me a hug, even though we had only met once before and only briefly.  

Something that I would learn in the next hour and a half is that she has a beautiful community here in St. Louis. The positive vibes are not surprising when she’s the kind of person who says nonchalantly, “I’m always thinking about family first. Then friends. Then me. Sometimes I feel like I’m always giving. But I cannot change. This is me.” She has a plot of land at the shared garden at the end of the street and brings her kids to one restaurant each week to support local businesses. While Lona’s may not be located in the most hoppin’ part of the city, the blessing of being in a residential area is that her customers can easily walk in for lunch or dinner. One such neighbor-customer is wearing stretchy, athletic clothing and has earbuds in, as if she just went on a walk or run and was stopping by Lona’s for food on her way home. She pauses at our table near the entrance to chat with Lona before going inside. Multiple times during our conversation, people heading in or out of the restaurant come by to hug her or squeeze her shoulder, both customers and employees. I’m introduced to multiple neighbors, one of her chefs, and Pierce, who even brings out a pot of spring needle tea for us, with two tiny porcelain tea cups.  

When I ask how they met, she tells me that he was an English teacher at a place where she worked in Kunming, the city she moved to after leaving her village. She didn’t enjoy speaking English, and the teachers would often change, so she was late to her meeting with him--”Ugh, another new teacher,” she recalls. Now that she’s lived in the U.S. for 10 years, her English is decent; she has an accent and speaks slowly, but the pace is more a factor of her chill personality rather than lack of knowing the language. She’s chill in the sense that when she returns to her village every year or two, back in China where her parents still live, she doesn’t brag about how well her restaurant is doing and the fact that she’s been featured in multiple publications; she would rather just be in the presence of her family and friends, in her flip flops, living the way that she used to. On the subject of life back home versus here, Lona confidently states, “I’m pretty easy to accept other outside culture, but I wouldn’t ever drop my culture. Because every time I go back, I completely just be there. Just the person over there. No one says I’m changed.”

Growing up, her family didn’t have much money, and food was scarce. She would have to fish, hunt, and forage for meals, to supplement what they planted and the livestock they raised. As the oldest child of four, she was responsible for finding creative ways to make whatever she was able to obtain taste good. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. She laughs about how her mom would chastise her for wasting food whenever she messed up a meal, but her dad would encourage her to keep trying. Lona mentions her village often, and it’s clear that she misses it. 

It’s also clear that her upbringing influenced the way she lives now and the way she runs her restaurant. Instead of buying her fresh produce in bulk or from a large distributor, she prefers to handpick vegetables herself, making frequent visits to Asian grocers around here. She says that pretty vegetables delivered on truck pallets often have too many chemicals sprayed on them to make them look that way. The greens are important because Lona’s Lil Eats caters to many vegetarians and vegans. Lona herself is neither, but she is deliberate about the amount of meat she eats. While cooking is her passion, she also has a dream of establishing a farm where she could teach kids to live off the earth--to wash clothes by hand, cook by fire, and kill animals for meat. This last skill may seem violent to some, but Lona views the environment as interconnected: “I never teach my kids like, ‘Oh, poor animal.’ We raising animal; we not torturing. We eating, but we work to exchange. We feel like that’s the circle, the connection. We don’t thinking about that’s bad. But if you don’t eat--you kill and just throw away--we don’t respect that way.” 

As we sip our tea, she talks about picking tea leaves from her family’s tea bushes back home and how loose leaf teas are fresher than tea bags. The Lona’s menu has an entire section dedicated to tea: green, oolong, white, and black teas are all available. The special part is that they all come directly from Lona’s friends and family in Yunnan, which is known not only for incredible food but also its tea. Her family also grows coffee but doesn’t make it or drink it themselves. She tells me about how she ate a coffee bean one time and was disgusted: “People actually like this?!” She didn’t realize that coffee beans go through a whole roasting, grinding, and brewing process before it’s consumed, not to mention all the sugar, milk, and cream that’s typically added in too. But Lona is clearly more of a tea person, anyway.

After we’ve finished the pot of tea, Lona and I head inside the restaurant, me to order lunch for myself and her to check on the kitchen staff. Of the several times I’ve been to Lona’s, it’s almost always been the same guy at the register. His name is Ryan. He’s thin, has prominent cheekbones and less prominent, but still visible, bags under his eyes. His brown-grey hair is tied back in a bun. Sometimes he’s friendly and somewhat sassy; today he’s grumpy and very sassy. One time, after apologizing for coming in 15 minutes before close and asking whether it’d be okay to dine in, he responded, “Well, I can’t tell you no.” But I get it--it was probably the end of a long work day for him, at the end of the week. Today, it’s Ryan at the register again, but this time he’s in a head bobbing, lip syncing kind of mood and smiles at me. This time, I order a rice paper wrap with chicken, salad, fried rice, and peanut sauce--to which he responds, “You know you could’ve just ordered the Big Thai Wrap?” His sass makes me look down at the menu and realize that I’ve just brilliantly created a custom wrap that already is a pre-existing, popular menu item. I add a pineapple-coconut butter cookie to the order because there’s a tantalizing stack of them in a glass case next to the register. There’s also a stack of another kind of cookie that I’ve never seen before. I ask him what they are, and he replies, “ginger molasses, but I personally think the pineapple-coconut ones are better. Unless you like ginger. But not me, after half of one of those cookies, I’m all ginger-ed out.” While I’m waiting for my order to come out, Lona walks over to my table with a tray of food for her own lunch and a small bowl of pickled vegetables. “Mind if I join you?” she asks. She hands me a pair of chopsticks and offers to share her food with me. 

Lona not only genuinely cares about her customers--she often walks around to each table near closing time--but she also treats her employees extremely well. The second time I sit down with Lona, I’m also able to chat with one of her friends and long-term employees afterwards. Zoe Eon (Greek for “life” and “long”) has worked at Lona’s Lil Eats for the past three years and has known Pierce’s family for 16 years. He calls Pierce’s older sister his “partner-in-crime, but not my girlfriend” and cannot say exactly the origins of his name, but hypothesizes, “I think my dad had long life in mind, even though it’s a girl’s name.” Zoe is talkative, funny, and able to multitask while we’re talking at the bar, to the left of the register; he first washes cups in the sink and then dries them one by one, setting them upside down on the counter between us. He is tall and wears athletic clothing, allowing him to move swiftly around the restaurant as he manages the phone, the cleaning, and the register all at once. 

Zoe only has fantastic things to say about Lona’s. His whole career has been in the service industry--restaurants and delivery places--but this job outshines the others: “I don’t think I could work at another restaurant after working here. There’s no reason for me to leave.” He praises the generous free meal program for employees, Lona and Pierce’s genuine concern for their staff’s mental and physical health (“If you come in not looking real good, like if you’re feeling bad or distracted, if possible they would want you to go home or will say, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you take a night off?’”), and the food (which he’s eaten five times a week for the past three years and still loves). The fact that there’s very low turnover at Lona’s is an indication of her great management style, given that in the restaurant industry, people are always coming and going. Zoe also believes that Lona’s has “the best customers out of anywhere I have ever worked--it has to do with the kind of people we attract and the area we live in.” He tells me that they know one out of every five customers by name. 

And now I’m another customer they know by name. It’s only my second time meeting Pierce, but he remembers me. After my conversation with Zoe, I stop by to chat with Pierce and Lona before I head out. He’s quieter than Lona and has a relaxed demeanor, reflected by his basic flannel shirt and loose, wavy grey hair that is slightly longer than most guys keep their hair. He’s about a year younger than her. They ask me about my life--where in China my parents are from, whether I speak Chinese, where home is, what I study, and where I’m going after I graduate from college in two weeks. At some point, I mention the collage of photos that first gave me a glimpse into their lives. On this day, it’s not on the wall (in fact, there’s nothing on the wall) because they’re repainting it. But when I bring it up, Pierce stands, brings it out from a room, and hangs it on the wall for me to look at. Lona stands next to me, pointing out her parents, her daughter, and other family members. These photos have greater meaning now.