Henry Chung, a prolific San Francisco restaurateur and one of the first chefs to introduce Hunanese cuisine to the United States, died Sunday at age 99.

Mr. Chung and his wife, Diana, are most famous for their Hunan Restaurant, which opened in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1974 and gave rise to the flourishing Henry’s Hunan chain. By the time he became a restaurateur in his 50s, Mr. Chung had already lived an extraordinary life.

Mr. Chung was born in China into the landed peasant class in 1918 in Liling, Hunan, now a one-hour drive from the provincial capital of Changsha. He was married at the age of 8, in accordance with village custom; his bride was 12. Even as a young boy, said his children, Mr. Chung was already considered exceptional. He earned a scholarship to boarding school in the regional capital.

Despite the fact that he had three children by the time he graduated, his village helped send him to the National Central University in Nanjing, then the capital of Nationalist China. There he met and married another Hunanese student named Diana, a star athlete. It’s not clear how the first marriage ended. He separated from his family in Liling.

After college, Mr. Chung entered diplomatic service for the Nationalist government. He was posted for a short time to Japan after World War II. With the Communist Party massing around Mao Zedong in the couple’s home province, Mr. Chung wrangled a diplomatic posting to Houston in 1948, bringing Diana and their two children to the United States.

There, as the ambassador for a stateless government, Mr. Chung ran a Chinese Consulate out of a small apartment and waited for sporadic paychecks. When the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan and called him back, Diana Chung refused to leave the United States. He quit.

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, living in Houston and San Francisco, the Chungs tried every business they could think of: They opened ice cream shops, diners, shoe-repair services and toy stores. They had three more children. “They were able to sustain a living, but nothing that you would define as success,” youngest son Howard Chung said.

Finally, Mr. Chung landed a plum job as a manager for China Airlines. But Diana, bored and ambitious, wanted to open another restaurant that she would run. This one, the couple decided, would serve the Hunanese food they grew up with, which was all but unknown in Chinatown — let alone the rest of the United States.

Courtesy of the Chung family.

Hunan Restaurant’s first location, at 853 Kearny St., had a 10-seat counter and tables for another 26. In the early days, the Chungs’ children have said, San Francisco’s Cantonese residents spurned the Chungs’ chile-laden, pungent food. But in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and the 1965 loosening of U.S. immigration laws, a new generation of Chinese restaurants was opening around the country — and interest in Chinese regional cuisines was brewing.

Non-Cantonese diners took interest in Hunan Restaurant. One of them was New Yorker writer Tony Hiss, who after his Thanksgiving meal there in 1976 wrote that Hunan was “the best Chinese restaurant in the world.” It took two days for The Chronicle’s Herb Caen to share the news with his readers. After that, the lines became so long and so constant that street performers set up on the block to entertain them.

Thousands of restaurants with “Hunan” in the title, in tiny American towns as well as across Bay Area, can trace their names, if not their recipes, to the Chungs’ first restaurant. Its onion pancakes and its bold flavors — particularly the mountains of garlic and chiles that moved through the kitchen every day — caught on with the broader public. (The Chungs’ lovingly smoked meats, sadly, didn’t.) Mr. Chung, aided by Hiss, wrote a Hunanese cookbook in 1978, and appeared in Les Blank’s 1980 documentary “Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers.”

In 1979, the Chungs opened a 314-seat space on Sansome Street with a cocktail lounge, which also filled with diners. (In an early review, the Examiner critic R.B. Read complained that the restaurant had only four servers for all those seats.) And Henry Chung decided that since banks in America would loan him the money, he’d buy his own properties from then on out.

One more decision changed the future of the chain that came to be known as Henry’s Hunan. In 1982, after diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China were regularized, Henry and Diana Chung returned to China to search for Mr. Chung’s three eldest children.

They found that, during the Cultural Revolution, his progeny had been severely punished for Mr. Chung’s escape. The couple began bringing Mr. Chung’s children and their extended families to the United States. Buying more buildings and opening restaurants inside them gave the new arrivals employment. The number of Henry’s Hunan locations swelled to six, each one managed and staffed by a different branch of the family.

Katy Raddatz/SFC

Although they were tireless workers, Henry and Diana slowly stepped away from running the business as they grew older. Diana Chung died in 2003. Henry Chung remained very much the patriarch of the family. “He was always a little intimidating,” said granddaughter MacKenzie Fegan, who has become the family biographer, spending many hours collecting her grandfather’s stories.

Fegan says that her grandfather once told her she should live her best life. She prodded: What would that be? “Live a good life, eat good food, wear good clothes and don’t be sloppy,” he told her.

As revered as he was by his family, he in turn revered his ancestors, said daughter Sophia Chung Fegan (MacKenzie’s mother), as well as those whose generosity propelled him out of rural Hunan. “He was always talking about people who helped him in his journey,” she said.

Mr. Chung channeled his gratitude into education: first, his children’s, then his grandchildren’s, and finally those of students he might never meet. The Chungs built a gymnasium at a school in China and endowed scholarships at Sacred Heart Cathedral, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State.

Mr. Chung died at home in the Richmond District, survived by eight children and his many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His family is still deciding what form the memorial celebrations might take.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman