“I feel like a part of Woodstock,” says MarLee Wang, and town residents who remember the comings and goings of local businesses over the years would surely not disagree. Her Little Bear is one of the longest-running restaurants in Woodstock, established in the early 1970s as a component of Albert Grossman’s Bearsville cultural complex. She has worked there since the 1980s, when Sha Wu was the head chef, and took over running the place in the early 1990s. It’s still open and serving its signature specialties – Peking duck and crispy whole sea bass – despite the pandemic.
Right around the time that the folk-rock impresario was eyeing that parcel of land on Route 212 in Bearsville to build a recording studio, MarLee was born in Taiwan to “a great chef,” Pel Wen Wang, a Chinese expatriate from the seaport city of Qingdao. The family moved briefly to Tokyo when MarLee was four, and thence to the U.S.
The youngest of five girls and a self-described “tomboy,” MarLee was tapped to follow in her father’s culinary footsteps. “My father treated me like a boy,” she says, as she recalls watching him in the kitchen with fascination as a small child. “He told me, ‘Everybody has a talent. Maybe you’re the one in this family who has the talent to be a chef.’”
Pel Wen opened his first restaurant in America, Chef Wang, in West Nyack in the mid-1970s, and then brought the family to Woodstock, opening First Wok in 1985 and becoming a mentor to Sha Wu. When the latter set out on his own to open Wok ‘n’ Roll in 1990, The Little Bear became the province of the Wang family, which by then included MarLee’s late husband, David Koo, and their preschooler son.
Besides mastering several styles of Chinese cooking, MarLee has spent her years in Woodstock learning how to “put the customer first – let people feel at home, feel comfortable.” She developed a reputation for making specialties upon request for individual diners. The Little Bear has always accommodated patrons on vegetarian or gluten-free diets, and MarLee makes it her business to learn what regular customers want that isn’t necessarily on the menu. “You tell me, I will provide it for you,” she says.
The result has been customer loyalty spanning decades: “There are a lot of return customers. I’ve seen three, four generations. People bring their kids. Some people go away 20 years and come back. They love the streamside dining.”
With the Bear Café closed and live shows at the Bearsville Theater on an extended hiatus due to Covid 19, The Little Bear and WDST Radio Woodstock are the only businesses currently in active operation in the Bearsville Center. And the radio station is gearing up to relocate to a new site on Route 28.
But MarLee isn’t going anyplace just yet. She’s full of praise for the business arrangement she was able to work out with Lizzie Vann, who took over the complex in 2019, and for Vann’s decision not to change the rustic look of the space. “She’s doing a great job. I have a lot of respect for her.”
The pandemic has hurt business, of course, and MarLee has coped by “just keeping my life simple.” After several months of takeout-only service, The Little Bear is now open once again for socially distanced sit-down dining, at 25 percent capacity. “So many people said, ‘Thank you for opening, we missed your food.’ It touched my heart.”
Current kitchen hours are from 3 to 9 p.m., Thursday through Tuesday. According to MarLee, Nancy’s Ice Cream is planning to relocate to the Bearsville Center in October, which should generate additional traffic, and she’s hoping to see a new tenant in the Bear Café space in the foreseeable future.
Why not just retire at this point, after such a long career? “My goal is to try to make The Little Bear go over 50 years, which would be about another seven years. If I can make it 50 years, I’ll retire. Then I’m done.”
She pauses to reconsider, terming herself a workaholic. “Maybe I’ll work part-time. If I’m healthy, I’d like to travel – to try different restaurants.”
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