McHenry’s Plum Garden was started by a single mother in 1965. The restaurant is still going strong

It’s a love letter to his grandmother Connie Moy that the McHenry restaurant she founded is still using her original recipes, made with the same attention and care she used, Jason Moy said.

“We are very rabid about keeping it the same” including going to Chicago’s Chinatown to find authentic ingredients if they cannot source them locally, Jason Moy said as his grandmother’s restaurant, Plum Garden, celebrates 60 years in the same Main Street location.

Connie Moy was a widow with three children in tow, working in an uncle’s Park Ridge restaurant but knowing she’d need to open her own restaurant, her son Perry Moy said.

Now 75, Perry Moy remembers his mother loaded her family onto a Metra train one Sunday to go check out McHenry County in 1965. She wanted to find a community in which to open a Chinese restaurant, preferably in a town that did not already have one, he said.

“We got off the train in McHenry and walked up the street. There was a man washing the window” at 3917 Main Street, Perry Moy said.

Translating for his mother, who arrived in the U.S. after WWII, he asked the man how much it would cost to rent the building.

“He said $70 a month, he would throw in utilities and we could live upstairs,” Perry Moy said.

From that conversation, Plum Garden was founded as a takeout-only restaurant.

“McHenry’s population was 2,400 or 2,500 people, and they embraced us,” Perry Moy said. “It was amazing how they embraced our family.”

He walked to McHenry High School – now the East Campus – and graduated in 1969. While he had ambitions of becoming an actor, Connie put a stop to that.

“She said, ‘No you are not, you are going to work here with me and that is it,’” he said.

He had ideas for the restaurant too. At his suggestion, in 1970, they took out a bank loan to expand and add sit-down service and get a liquor license. In 2014, they took out a wall and expanded seating into the building next door.

Along the way, Connie Moy bought the building too. She was “the first minority business owner in McHenry and the first that owned her own building,” Jason Moy said. “Everything we have learned from her, the tests that she had to endure as a minority woman in a male-dominated field while barely speaking English ... she made things happen.”

Much like his dad, Jason Moy wasn’t planning on taking over the family restaurant. He’d worked in the kitchen as a youth but went to college for premed before switching to finance. He was in college when Perry had a heart attack.

“That changed things. I was 20 years old at the time” and there was no succession plan for the business, Jason Moy said. “It wasn’t going to be a quick fix and there were a lot of challenges to keep the restaurant running.”

The menu today is 90% the same as it was in the 1970s. Any changes are based on ingredient availability or changing consumer tastes.

“We are Chinese-American comfort food, and we are sticking to the recipes my grandmother and father created,” Jason Moy said.

Plum Garden was also farm-to-table before that became a restaurant buzzword, buying vegetables from area farmers, Perry Moy said. Now it is harder to find some of those ingredients locally, but they still have high standards.

“We have trained ourselves to look for the quality we want here,” Jason Moy said.

It’s a trait that is appreciated by their customers. When friends visit, Real estate agent Lori Gentzel said she takes them to Plum Garden.

“When I first moved to McHenry three years ago, it was one of the first places my [partner’s] mom first took me as a staple of McHenry. I love the food and the meaning behind the food,” Gentzel said. “It is the best Chinese in the area.”

While Perry Moy never went off to make movies, he found other ways to be involved in his adopted hometown. He served a term on McHenry County Board and later had an unsuccessful run for a seat in Springfield. He volunteered on other commissions and boards – and did some acting in local community theater.

Connie’s other children stayed in McHenry, too. Sister Maxine Cwiak was a server at the restaurant until she retired, and brother Jim Moy worked at the U.S. Postal Service. Another sister, Ling Huang, was born in China and eventually was able to join her mother and siblings in the U.S.

“Maxine and Perry became pillars of the community, engaged in civic leadership,” said McHenry County Board member Pam Althoff, adding that Plum Garden was a Friday night staple for her family. Connie Moy, who died in 2006, was a part of the tapestry that is McHenry, Althoff added.

“She was accepted lovingly and fully” in the community, Althoff said of Moy. “She raised her kids to be as community-minded as the restaurant was.”