By all accounts, Gizela Ho should not be intimidated by other chefs.
She helmed Rich Table in San Francisco, which regularly lands in top 10 best restaurants lists. She left her chef de cuisine role last year to focus on opening her highly anticipated restaurant, Good Morning 96. While she’s been prepping her new restaurant, she’s been popping up at Michelin-starred restaurants such as Nisei and Angler SF and collaborating with award-winning chefs.
Three of the dishes for the special dinner, stuffed chicken wings, fried squash, and fish tacos. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
Ho, though, says working in the kitchen of one of Oakland’s highly regarded traditional Chinese seafood restaurants made her feel the most nervous out of all. Growing up on Guam, with a grandfather who ran a restaurant in Hong Kong, she remembers being told that being a chef wasn’t an appropriate career for a girl.
“It’s a whole different realm,” Ho said. “Those types of kitchens function so differently than fine dining. They don’t normally let women in those kitchens. It’s a very older generation, male-dominated industry – more so than current times.”
But that won’t be the case Friday, Sept. 18, though. Ho is partnering with Peony Seafood Restaurant, the only remaining Chinese banquet-style restaurant in Oakland.
Ho is working with the all-male team of chefs, led by a head chef, Liang Guo Run, who previously worked in a five-star international hotel kitchen in China.
A Peony Seafood chef works on a dish during dinner service at the Oakland Chinatown restaurant. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
She and the Peony staff came up with a one-time, 10-course menu to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, using Peony’s banquet dishes as a jumping-off point.
The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival is the biggest holiday for Chinese and many other Asian cultures after the Lunar New Year. The $151 dinner (including tip) will be family-style at a round table with a lazy susan in the middle. There is also a $65 cocktail pairing from Viridian Bar, as an add-on, which includes four cocktails: winter gourd, wasabi mami, sea + smoke, and tomato beef.
Closing the generational divide with the shared language of food
Nine days before the collaborative dinner, Ho is in the kitchen on the hottest day of the year, testing three of the 10 dishes that will be featured on the menu.
Peony Seafood Restaurant; 388 9th St Ste. 288, Oakland
$151 per person (tip included), with optional $65 cocktail pairing; reservations
What’s on the menu:
The collaborative menu includes more than a dozen dishes, about half traditional, and half fusion dishes created by Gizela Ho with the Peony chefs.
Roasted suckling pig with osetra caviar
Braised abalone, sea cucumber, and fish maw, on little gem “lettuce cups”
Shrimp and scallop stuffed chicken wing with fish sauce caramel
Jellyfish salad, seaweed salad, mushroom beancurd roll
Wintermelon gourd soup with shiitake, scallop, and shrimp
Salt and pepper fish taco, pickled melon, cantaloupe mae ploy sauce
Crispy Kiln roasted lemongrass chicken
Sugar snap peas and morel mushroom stir fry
Tempura fried red kuri squash with summer pepper sweet and sour sauce
Longevity noodles with dungeness crab from Oregon, creme fraiche, and smoked trout roe
Swiss roll olive oil cake with fresh figs inside
Oranges, madras curry, and crispy curry leaves
Droo the Baker mooncake
One of the Peony staff members slices squash into moon shapes. They ask her if it’s too thick. They recut the squash slightly thinner. Then, another cook deep-fries them in a batter like the one used for honey walnut shrimp. Ho then tosses it in a sauce inspired by her grandfather’s sweet and sour sauce recipe, using juiced sweet red peppers, pineapple, and oranges, topping it off with lemon zest.
“We thought it would be fun bringing new ideas and flavors to a very traditional and old-school setting,” said Anna Zhu, who manages Peony’s social media and is the outreach manager for the restaurant, explaining how the collaboration came about. Zhu and Ho had been introduced through a mutual colleague.
Next is the stuffed chicken wing. Ho’s made a stuffing of shrimp and scallops mixed with herbs and aromatics. Each wing has been brushed twice in a slurry to keep the black and white sesame seeds on the skin. She passes the wings to another chef for frying. Then, she tosses them in a fish sauce caramel glaze.
Fresh off her popup a few weeks ago at Oakland’s Pomet, Ho cooked at Peony for eight evenings to come up with the special menu. On her first day, only Chef Liang spoke to her. By the third day, the other chefs started to chat with her, joking with her and asking what she was going to cook that day. She speaks fluent Cantonese, so that helped.
(Top) The dining room at Peony Seafood Restaurant, the only remaining Chinese banquet-style restaurant in Oakland. (Bottom) A Peony Seafood Restaurant staff member carves a fresh duck for a table during diner service. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
She said they bonded over shared skills in cooking, even if the kitchen styles were different. In a Western-style kitchen, for example, each person is responsible for certain dishes. In the kitchen at Peony, all of the chefs can cook all of the wok dishes, though a few specialty dishes are only handled by the head chef. But when it comes down to food and cooking, they share a bond. They nerded over how to get the chicken skin really crispy, for example. She says that seeing how the kitchen at Peony works is giving her ideas for her own restaurant in the future.
Then, there’s the fish tacos she’s making. Using a tortilla press, she hand-makes each shell with a dough made from a mix of masa and rice flour, cooks them on the griddle, and then fries them. Meanwhile, another Peony chef is frying pieces of “dragon tongue” fish, a type of sole, used in the restaurant’s salt and pepper fish dish. Ho then delicately places a large piece of fish inside each taco shell, drizzles pickled melon sauce she’s made, and uses chef’s tweezers to add diced fresh cantaloupe and finely sliced scallions.
Gizela Ho of Good Morning 96 prepares dishes from a special one night menu at Peony Seafood Restaurant in Oakland Chinatown. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
Meanwhile, the other chefs are very curious about what she’s cooking, but there is little time for chit chat. While she’s testing her dishes, the Peony staff are busy cutting live king crab, steaming whole fish, and tossing woks over big flames for dinner service. “I am very happy and excited to work with Gizela,” Liang later said through a Cantonese interpreter. “We’re bringing China’s long-established culinary traditions to the West and combining them with modern Western food culture.”
There’s a benefit for Peony, too, through this collaboration. Peony has been in Chinatown for well over 20 years. Peony nearly closed for good during the pandemic. Almost all of the large, banquet-style Chinese restaurants have closed in San Francisco and Oakland. But its cultural significance can’t be understated. It’s where people go to celebrate weddings, birthdays, and red egg and ginger parties, which celebrate the 100 days after a baby is born. Politicos also regularly book banquet halls for fundraising or celebratory events.
Gizela Ho watches as a Peony Seafood chef works on a dish at the Oakland Chinatown restaurant. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
Zhu, whose father helps manage the restaurant, says she hopes to collaborate with more chefs down the line. Ho is the first chef to be invited into the kitchen to do a true collaborative meal.
“Post-pandemic, Oakland Chinatown has suffered a lot of consequences from that,” Zhu said. “By doing these collaborations, we’re trying to get the younger generation crowd back, and people who grew up going to birthdays or banquets. Hopefully, they can bring their families back into Chinatown.”
Peony’s kitchen includes three departments: chefs who specialize in making dim sum, with a total of about 100 items; BBQ chefs; and wok cooking chefs. Dim sum is served all day, with a smaller dim sum menu during the dinner service.
Ho said she wanted to celebrate the banquet-style dining in Chinese seafood restaurants, known for their live seafood tanks, Peking duck, and other special occasion dishes. Typically, banquet dining means sitting at a round table of ten with a lazy susan in the middle, sharing tea and dishes. Dishes include meat, lobster, fish, soup, longevity noodles, a whole pig, Peking duck, a cold platter with jellyfish, and dessert and fruit.
Peony Seafood Restaurant staff prepare orders in Oakland Chinatown on Wednesday Sept. 9, 2026. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for East Bay Nosh
The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which is Friday, September 25, is when people typically eat mooncakes. To celebrate at this dinner, each attendee will also be gifted a mooncake by Andrew Hong, known as “Droo the Baker.”
Ho says that going to Peony made her feel like she was starting fresh, needing to arrive early and leave late, and showing off her cooking chops. But it turns out they speak the same language: food. “It’s not as intimidating or as challenging as I thought it would be,” Ho admits.
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Dining and Cooking