Abundance Culinary, Ohio Is a Modern Chinese Restaurant for These Times

Abundance Culinary could only exist in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The borough and its nearly 45,000 residents centres around the Cedar Lee high street and surrounding commercial areas, where Abundance Culinary sits – a mad libs modern Chinese restaurant that opened last year. Occupying a retro-fit diner, Abundance is just a short walk from the local high school, a craft brewery, the dollar store, the city’s Buddhist centre, and a smattering of specialist restaurants and shops offering cuisines, including Ethiopian and Turkish, and a kosher market. Cedar Lee’s businesses reflect the area’s history and shifts in demographics over the last seventy years; Cleveland Heights is a first ring suburb on the city’s east side, known for its local arts scene and diverse make up, currently with a prominent Black community and Catholic community among others, and an adjacent Orthodox Jewish community in the neighbouring borough of University Heights. 

The name, styled’ABunDance’, is multifunctional, referencing the food at the centre of its story: the generous and adaptive mindset co-founder and chef Liu Fang brings to her kitchen, and a nod to the abundance of resources many Northeastern Ohioans take for granted, from local fish sourced from Lake Erie, to cheese and corn from Amish farmers in nearby Burton, Ohio, and farmlands across the state. At its core, it’s a place of multitudes – from identity to ingredients. In another way, the menu is abundant, too: it is unlike the typical American-Chinese restaurant experience in the midwest, and instead promotes a variety of regional Chinese cuisines, with dishes that use fermented ingredients and count flavours like Sichuan peppercorns as staples. Liu has always wanted to deliver wide-ranging flavours that reflect a mixture of her Northern Chinese traditions and modern Chinese dining – a sharp contrast to the time capsule of the popular food trends that remain in the US but have long since left China. “It’s hard to communicate the progress of a place that’s so far away,” says Setzer. 

Liu and Setzer emigrated to Cleveland out of pure circumstantial necessity, the combination of a new pregnancy and a lack of access to prenatal care due to the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Three suitcases and four years later, Liu Fang is head chef and co-founder of Abundance Culinary. This once-pop-up, now permanent restaurant, has significantly expanded the Chinese cuisine options on Cleveland’s east side.

Setzer, who originally from the area, left Cleveland for China in 1999, where the couple met, married, and eventually founded and ran what became known as China’s most successful craft brewery, Great Leap in Beijing. They were forced to eventually abandon it when Liu’s prenatal care was considered non-essential by public health at the onset of the pandemic. Having previously miscarried, it was a non-choice. Setzer called his closest childhood friend in Cleveland, and they left for a mound of paperwork and the promise of a community to help them settle in. Setzer recalls the surreal joy watching their oldest son, Robbie, ride the big yellow school bus for the first time.

The process of running a business overseas is one thing. Trying to untangle the bureaucratic red tape of closed borders, visa applications, and COVID testing restrictions is another challenge entirely. After Liu and Setzer left China, the borders closed behind them, taking months of applications for Setzer to be allowed back into the country to visit the beer business’s shareholders and figure out what to do. During his eventual trip back, some nine months later, as nations and cities came to a standstill, Setzer was first sent to a ‘quarantine hotel’ in Shanghai, then later a detention and surveillance centre where he was kept for weeks against his will, alongside the threat of being detained for months. A four-part diary of Setzer’s experience can be found on Atlantic journalist James Fallow’s Substack, Breaking the News. 

While Setzer was away, Liu began to lean into any calming techniques she could, including dumpling-making. The act became a focal point, a means to feed herself and their children and manage her anxiety. The repetitive task was also a way to keep herself awake in the evenings so she could sync up with Setzer, many time zones away, and try to understand what was happening to him. “I found it so healing just to do one thing repetitively and just let muscle memory guide me,” says Liu. The dumplings would become the beginning of her family’s new journey. Liu met with a few local chefs and eventually began hosting a successful pop-up turned part-time residency at Jeremy Umansky’s Larder Deli and Bakery on Sundays and Mondays, when the kitchen wasn’t in use. It was there Liu met Doug Katz, a well-known local chef, restaurateur and owner of Abundance’s now permanent diner premises, who offered her a permanent and full time location.

Both Liu and Setzer communicate in a way that both cuts away the bullshit and conveys a sense of warmth. Liu’s menu is the same, delivering personal-led introductions to modern, regional cuisine in packages that retain a sense of familiarity to customers – introductions delivered primarily via noodles and dumplings. Liu also makes use of the abundance of resources and the city’s love affair with specific ingredients by incorporating some of Cleveland’s staples: sauerkraut, brisket and kielbasa, into her dumpling fillings by treating them like traditional Chinese ingredients. These ingredients, Liu says, were also once seen as just scraps. But here, they, too, have been made into something special through the same resourceful mindset that Liu and Setzer employ in the kitchen and life. 

Having an ‘abundance mindset’ is not just about resourcefulness, but about resilience and adaptation in order to continually create and move forward. Liu and Setzer have together managed to use those traits to keep their mission and integrity at the core of the business, but equally being open to interpretation and welcoming collaborations from the community, including with other chefs and producers from a range of backgrounds, like its alkaline ramen noodles from Ohio City Pasta, a local pasta company, which they use in all of the noodle dishes. In that sense, it is a restaurant of and for these times, where plainly, together we are stronger.    

Having fought against cultural culinary norms and naysayers once before with their craft brewery (a craft brewery in China was an exercise in futility, they were told) the pair were ready for their challenge. There’s a hint of this in the tone in Setzer’s voice, a tell of his rustbelt mindset – an underdog out to beat the odds – an identity that’s been woven into the fabric of cities like Cleveland and Detroit, largely out of necessity. It’s also reflected by way of a quiet smile – one of confidence and determination – that forms on Liu’s face as we speak. Different expressions of the same language and mindset. 

The success of Abundance’s approach also comes down to the details: There’s a clear give and take within the menu, which has changed since they moved into the diner in 2023. Each version showcases Liu’s desire to bring new ideas and ingredients, while also meeting customers where they are by offering her own take on a few local favourites. Currently the menu features Liu’s Chinese take on grits and meatloaf; a handshake of mutual acknowledgement delivered through food. Earlier iterations included dishes listed using their original Chinese names. Setzer noted their refusal to simply number the dishes, as is often customary in old school Chinese American restaurants, many of which still thrive in the area. “We’re going to get people to say the name. It’s just a word and there is some value in getting it wrong. It doesn’t have to be super serious,” he says. Abundance isn’t stuck in the past, or tied to one way of doing things, instead Liu is showcasing what modern Chinese American cuisine looks like: adaptive, innovative and fluid while remaining rooted in key flavours and techniques. 

It turns out, that has an audience. Unlike the couple’s experience with the brewery, where they say customers seemed reluctant to admit they enjoyed the product, Clevelanders seem to be enthusiastically embracing the change and overall presence of Abundance Culinary, wearing the new experience of tongue-numbing Sichuan peppercorns like a badge of pride. “The community has been so supportive in a way I hadn’t expected,” Liu says. 

Liu’s food at Abundance – always complex, flavourful, and bright – has made the headlines in just about all the local papers, winning best newcomer awards and ‘chefs to watch’ accolades from national magazines. Because Liu’s talents are not just encased in the dumplings she makes, but her adaptive approach towards food which calls in and embraces multiple communities, while remaining rooted in her heritage. The Abundance project and brand meanwhile has been enhanced by Setzer’s advocacy, itself bolstered by his insider status as a white guy from Cleveland. 

“Chinese cuisine is so highly original, with so many varieties and flavours,” he says. “It’s like a museum exhibition, and you can change your display all the time.” It isn’t just the food that’s on display inside the diner, it is a mixture of identities and pluralities coming together at the counter, in booths and on the plate to create something new yet familiar for the whole community.

“Over the last nineteen months we’ve grown to know our new home in Cleveland Heights and the  amazing people on our ever expanding team,” Setzer wrote in a recent email. “We feel a lot of momentum moving into the future as we expand … making us as real of a restaurant to our customers as we’ve always been to ourselves.”

Adrienne Katz Kennedy is a food and culture writer living in London. You can find her on Instagram @akatzkennedy and @youcantbeatababka. 

All photography by Sophie Kannberg.