Foo had a sizzling run here, back when Restaurant Row was ascendant. That was before Le Bec-Fin would have dreamed of serving a $15.23 Express Lunch burger to ride out the current hard times: In January, it wasn't rare for Susanna Foo to serve just 20 dinners, total.

She added a halfhearted take-out and delivery service. One day her pastry chef delivered the lunches to our office.

In this very space where we are sitting, at the front of the house, as they say, Foo remembers there was a piano to one side when she was thinking of moving in. And "a fake steak," which is to say a lifelike model of one. And a violin, the signature of Arthur's Steak House (and for its last year, Arturo's), which in the '80s, sensing that fatty slabs of red meat were the wave of the past, tried belatedly to get on the seafood bandwagon, the opposite path, ironically, that Foo's neighbor, Striped Bass, recently took.

It jumped from fish house to steak house last year, reflagged as Butcher & Singer.

Times change.

A platter of exquisite dumplings appears, each with a story - the pork pot sticker, the vegetable (a mince of baby Shanghai bok choy, spinach, and shiitake), the mushroom/chicken, the shrimp on a puddle of sun-dried tomato sauce, the deep-fried curried chicken, and "Mongolian lamb pillow," which takes her back to her childhood in Inner Mongolia, in China's north, where she was born, not as "Susanna," which was suggested to her later by a friendly American family, but Su Sui-Lan.

So the Italian produce guys at the Food Distribution Center in South Philly have it closer to the original when they call out to her, greeting her as "Sue" on her regular weekly shopping trips.

Northern China, of course, is known for its noodles (wheat being more a staple than rice), as Foo wrote in her acclaimed 1995 cookbook, Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine. But it is also known for distinctive lamb cookery, seasoned as these delicate lamb pillows reflect, with garlic, scallions, chives, and leeks.

She would move later to more tropical climes on the southern tip of Taiwan, and in 1966 with her husband E-Hsin, to Pittsburgh, where they did graduate studies, hers in library science.

She had also studied Chinese cookery with a teacher "the equal of Julia Child in Taiwan," later taking up cooking in Western pots rather than woks, eventually helping her extended family operate a restaurant, in a former hoagie shop in Wayne, called Hu-Nan. (Her brother-in-law and his wife still have a restaurant of that name in Ardmore.)

It was at the first Hu-Nan - where the family was struggling desperately for business - that Foo met a man who changed her life.

He was Jacob Rosenthal, the retired president of the Culinary Institute of America.

He lived in an apartment a few blocks away, and (as the story goes) was impressed by Hu-Nan's fresh dishes.

He took Foo under his wing, arranged for a friend to come to Hu-Nan to teach her how to make French stocks and sauces, "how to brown bones for added flavor."

In the winter of 1981, she attended the Culinary Institute of America herself, and the rest is history: She would forgo sharp rice vinegars, she writes, replacing them with balsamic vinegar, closer to the complex flavor of the black vinegar of her youth.

She reveled in the joys of good olive oil, employing it instead of peanut and sesame oils in lighter dishes.

She found that vodka, gin, and vermouth married well with shellfish and white meat.

Yet the day after closing Susanna Foo, the family dinner she cooked in her Radnor kitchen made no pretense at innovation; it was a sauce of pork, honey and garlic, chunked with potato and tomatoes, over homemade pasta - soul food straight out of the tradition of her native northern China.

"Maybe this is the life I should have," she said afterward. "But maybe in two years, I'm tired of this."