There's a line in an old Chinese poem, the gist of which is that if one wants the best in Chinese cooking, one should eat Cantonese cuisine. That was Ngalan Tam Lee's specialty.
Mrs. Lee and her husband, James Soon Lee, came to Georgia from San Francisco in 1975 at the invitation of relatives already here who said there were very few Chinese restaurants in metro Atlanta and saw that as an opportunity to start a new one.
The Lees' first place, called the Chinese Garden, was in Sandy Springs and was one of only a handful of Chinese restaurants in the entire metro area. After three years, the Lees sold the Chinese Garden, then moved to Carrollton to help relatives run a Chinese restaurant there.
A year later, the Lees opened another restaurant, called the Hong Kong, this time on Buford Highway in Doraville. Their son, Dr. Louis Lee of Roswell, said it was the first restaurant in the Atlanta area to serve dim sum, a snack-like dish that originated in south China.
After several years, the Lees sold that restaurant, too, and in 1987 opened their third place, the House of Lee Chinese Restaurant, in Lithonia, which they operated for a decade.
"Mom and Dad worked from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., every day of the year except for major holidays," Dr. Lee said. "But each of them had a well-developed work ethic from childhood."
"Dad took care of the front, greeting customers and tending the bar, while Mom was the chef. She didn't have formal training, but she learned a lot about cooking from her family growing up in south China."
Her husband said Mrs. Lee was a friendly sort who periodically left the kitchen to mingle with diners and check to see if they were pleased with their meals.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time they would say they were very satisfied," he said.
One of the Lees' former employees, Bo Giles, of Gainesville, said he was a teenage working as a dishwasher and observed Mrs. Lee's cooking mastery up close.
"She's the reason," he said, "that when I got my first apartment, the first thing I bought for it was a wok, so I could fix my own stir-fry dinners."
Another former teenage dishwasher and busboy, Greg Hardy of Covington, said Mrs. Lee always treated him kindly, making sure he got his fill of sweat-and-sour this or sweet-and sour that, plus egg rolls.
Ngalan Tam Lee, 74, of Conyers died of pneumonia Feb. 24 at DeKalb Medical Center. Her funeral is 11:30 a.m. Sunday at Wages and Sons Funeral Home, Lawrenceville, with burial March 13 in Colma, Calif.
Mrs. Lee was born and reared in China's Canton state and was trained as a teacher of the Chinese language. In 1960, after some difficulty with the Chinese bureaucracy, she acquired an exit visa to go live with relatives in Hong Kong, then a British crown colony. Four years later, she met her husband-to-be, who had immigrated to the United States years before and was back in Hong Kong for a visit.
The two were wed in 1964 and settled close to relatives in the San Francisco area for about a decade before moving to Georgia.
After she retired, Mrs. Lee learned to love travel abroad, said her sister, Paula Mock of Oakland, Calif. Not only did the two of them make several trips to visit cousins, nephews and nieces in mainland China; Mrs. Lee enjoyed visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, England, France and Switzerland.
Survivors also include a daughter, Wendy Lee of Conyers, and six grandchildren.
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