Stanley Lui took over the family diner at 21. Now, he’s ready for his next act.

Like many small-business owners, Stanley Lui has a love-hate relationship with his cafe. As a kid, Lui can say for sure, he hated it. 

Lui’s parents, both immigrants from Southern China, bought the restaurant in the early 1990s. Almost every day at 5:30 a.m., they would get up and wake one of the three kids to go to the restaurant that day. 

“There were days where I’d pretend to be really deeply asleep so they wouldn’t take me,” Lui said. 

When Lui was there, he slept in the red booths or played with the calculator as his parents worked. “It was the classic immigrant experience, where the parents are working and you’re just essentially trying to stay out of trouble.”

As customers came through, Lui got shuffled from table to table to make way for customers. Eventually he began chatting with the regulars.

“It was that, or boredom,” Lui recalled.

But Lui also learned that, unlike his siblings, he loved to cook.

When he went away to study at University of California, Davis, Lui had his own kitchen for the first time. He cooked for roommates, neighbors and friends. One roommate told him, “I think I eat better here than I do at home.”

Every day, Lui trolled the Food Network website, looking for recipes that he could afford to make. 

During his sophomore year, Lui decided to host his first Thanksgiving dinner. He ran through logistics, created spreadsheets and planned out timing. At one point, he realized he did not have enough ovens, and had to borrow his neighbor’s; thankfully, the neighbor was also over for dinner. Against his better judgement, Lui got a giant turkey. Over 20 pounds, he recalled. 

“I spent more time just wrestling with the turkey than actually cooking it,” Lui said. “It’s so slippery, I was just slipping and sliding with that thing in the kitchen.”

Around 2010, health issues forced his father to retire, and Lui took over the New Taraval Cafe. He was 21. The first couple of years, Lui said, he sucked at running the restaurant. It was like Thanksgiving dinner, every day. 

He had to learn bookkeeping. He had to learn how to organize the kitchen in a way that appeased the city’s health inspector. Most importantly, he had to get food ready for customers in a short amount of time. “That’s why I can’t play Overcooked,” he said. 

He got better at the job. In the early days, Lui was so scared of small talk that he prepared talking points to bring up to the customers. He studied up on football so he had something to talk about. 

Now, years later, he has played therapist at the counter, witnessed first dates and break-ups and mediated heated discussions about the Great Highway (he asks guests to keep their politics outside). 

“I have a lot of older customers where the restaurant is the center point of their day,” Lui said. 

Ultimately, he realized that it was conversations with customers — the same ones he had with regulars as a kid — that became his most treasured experiences.  

“When people ask me ‘What’s the best thing at this restaurant?’ I always tell them, ‘I don’t think it’s the food,’” Lui said. “It’s our ability to facilitate a comfortable space for everybody. That is the most meaningful thing, and that’s why I’ve kept it going for so long.” 

This is Lui’s 17th year working at the cafe, and Aug. 15 will be his last shift. The New Taraval Cafe will remain open, under the management of longtime employee (and co-owner) Orlando Gomez.  

“A part of me has been continuing this out of a feeling of obligation, both to my family and my customers,” said Lui, 38. “My strong emotional attachment to the restaurant really kept me from exploring.”

 “I never felt I could fully dive into something else,” Lui added. “It’s hard to invest yourself into something else when you always have that looming over you.” 

Now, he is ready to move on. 

On a recent Thursday, Stanley Lui served eggs Benedict and Irish breakfasts with a San Francisco marathon medal around his neck.

Lui had just finished his first-ever marathon and he was showing it off, he said. He filled up coffee mugs, brought out takeout boxes, chatting, laughing and sometimes lingering with customers. 

“It would not be strange for me to come join you and just have a seat with you as you’re enjoying your meal,” he said. 

That’s why, on Aug. 16, a day after he leaves New Taraval Cafe, Lui will host a gathering at Ocean Beach near Noriega Street.

He will invite customers and friends to celebrate the end of an era and remind them that their friendship can exist outside of New Taraval Cafe, where Lui no longer has to “leave a conversation mid-sentence” to bus a table or get a check.

Lui will not be away from food for long. His next step will be working at Chocolate Covered, a chocolate gift shop in Noe Valley — as an employee, for a change.

In college, Lui said, he majored in chemistry.

 “Oh,” this reporter said, “food is chemistry.” 

“Let me tell you a secret,” said Lui, immediately. “Everything is chemistry.” 

He’s heard this from people before. “When people say that, I feel it puts me into this box where ‘chemistry to food’ is the natural progression,” Lui said. 

“But I could have done anything. I can do anything. Maybe because of chemistry, maybe not.”