E-Hsin Foo, 68, of Center City restaurant

If northern Indiana winters hadn't been so brutal, Susanna Foo and her husband might never have opened the Center City restaurant that made her famous.

But while she eventually was named "truly one of this country's best chefs" by Gourmet magazine, E-Hsin Foo was the one, she said, who kept the Susanna Foo restaurant running for much of its 22 years, until a rare ailment afflicted him.

E-Hsin Foo, 68, died Tuesday, Aug. 3, at Bryn Mawr Hospital after a fall at their Radnor home.

In 1974, a job as an engineer had taken E-Hsin, Susanna, and their two young sons to Valparaiso, Ind., where, he later said, they weathered four of the worst winters in that state's history.

Yet when Mr. Foo's family called from Ardmore in 1978 to ask the couple to move to Philadelphia and run a new restaurant on Chestnut Street, Susanna Foo had her doubts. She and her husband had no restaurant experience.

But, Susanna Foo said Wednesday, those winters - and her persuasive spouse - erased her doubts and changed her life.

In 2009, their restaurant ended a 22-year run at 1512 Walnut St. on Restaurant Row, across from Georges Perrier's Le Bec-Fin, each nationally celebrated.

Mr. Foo, who for years was maitre d' at the Walnut Street restaurant, had a degenerative brain disease - progressive supranuclear palsy - that causes problems with balance and walking.

"He ran the front of the house," Susanna Foo said Wednesday, "and loved choosing the wines. But the last couple years, he didn't really work, he had the dementia."

Born in the Hunan province of China in 1942, Mr. Foo fled with his family to Taiwan at the time of the communist takeover in 1949.

After earning a bachelor's degree in engineering at National Taiwan University in Taipei in 1965 and a doctorate in metallurgy and materials science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, Mr. Foo taught for a year at Florida State University.

He returned to Taiwan to start and head the metallurgy and materials science department at National Tsing Hua University.

Then, it was on to those brutal winters in Indiana, where he worked for 3M Corp. and, although Susanna Foo had a degree in European history, she said Wednesday, "I was just a housewife."

They had met in Pittsburgh, where she was studying library science at the University of Pittsburgh, and married in 1967.

After the Foos arrived in Philadelphia from Northern Indiana, they eventually opened the family's Center City Hu-Nan Restaurant at 1721 Chestnut St., carrying the same name as the Foo family's restaurant on Lancaster Avenue in Ardmore.

From 1979 until 1987, Susanna Foo said Wednesday, that was where they learned the business.

In a 1990 interview, Mr. Foo told Inquirer restaurant critic Elaine Tait that his mother ran the Ardmore kitchen and "couldn't oversee the Philadelphia operation, too. . . .

"Susanna, trying to be a dutiful daughter-in-law, was helping with the serving staff at the Philadelphia restaurant, leaving the kitchen to a talented but headstrong chef. E-Hsin was the bartender."

Susanna Foo said Wednesday that the game-changer, the person who helped make the Foos celebrated by national culinary writers, was Jack Rosenthal, founder of the Culinary Institute of America.

At his urging, Susanna Foo took a nine-week French cooking course there, Tait wrote, "in the belief that a marriage of French techniques with Chinese ingredients would produce marvelous offspring."

When she returned, Susanna Foo went to work in the Philadelphia Hu-Nan kitchen. A few years later, Perrier told the Foos that a steak house was about to close at 1512 Walnut, across from Le Bec-Fin.

The Foos moved in, putting her Chinese-French creations on the menu and her name on the door. All because E-Hsin Foo had told his wife that there was a solution to those freezing winters in Indiana.

Besides his wife of 42 years, Mr. Foo is survived by sons Gabriel and Jim, three brothers, two sisters, and three grandchildren.

A funeral service was set for 2 p.m. Friday, Aug. 6, at the Chadwick & McKinney Funeral Home, 30 E. Athens Ave., Ardmore, with visitation from 12:30 to 2 p.m.

Donations in his name may be sent to Penn Memory Center, c/o Faye Silag, 3615 Chestnut St., Philadelphia 19104.