Jing Gao Turned a Chengdu Supper Club Into a Grocery Jar

A spoon of Jing Gao’s chili crisp leaves red oil and fried garlic on whatever is underneath. She built Fly By Jing around that jar, first as a supper club in Shanghai, later as the jar on shelves where American households already shop. Lao Gan Ma, the Guizhou chile crisp, was already in a lot of those kitchens. It costs less.

She was born in Chengdu. The family moved around Europe, and at school she called herself Jenny, because the other children could not say Jing. High school and university were in Canada. She told Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street that she took the name Jing back once she was cooking the food of that city again. Her first job out of school was brand manager at Procter & Gamble, on Gillette and CoverGirl. A job at Frog, a design studio, took her to Shanghai. She quit to cook.

Baoism was the first restaurant with her name on it, a modern Chinese place in Shanghai. She left after about two years, after a split with her business partner, and the restaurant closed. She has said the split taught her not to give up control of what she builds.

After Baoism she spent time in Yu Bo’s private kitchen, south of Chengdu. Yu Bo is one of the city’s best-known chefs. He cooks with abalone. That seafood comes from the sea, and Sichuan has no coast. He also cooks with Sichuan pepper, the berry that numbs. She told RADII in February 2018 about gutting fish, shelling hundreds of abalone, and tearing dried chicken jerky until the spices burned her hands. Then she plated his course of 16 cold appetizers. From books in his library she adapted mapo tofu and Zhong dumplings.

Fly By Jing takes its name from Chengdu’s fly restaurants, plain rooms whose cooking is said to pull people in like flies. She told RADII the stools are rickety, the tables spill into the alley, and people come for the flavor anyway. By early 2018 the club was a private kitchen in Shanghai, and sauce mixes were already for sale beside the dinners.

Zhong dumplings are a Chengdu street snack she was already cooking, pork dumplings in a sweet, garlicky chile sauce. She has described a childhood bite at a fly restaurant near her grandparents’ house, chili oil on her chin. That plate, she has said, is part of what later pulled her back to the city.

That summer she put Sichuan Chili Crisp on Kickstarter. The campaign called it an all-natural sauce made in Chengdu. She asked for $35,000. From June 4 to July 4, 2018, 1,683 people pledged $120,031. Then she moved to Los Angeles to sell the jar herself. She told Eater in 2022 that she could not find investors who believed in it, so she funded the company on her own. The first big batch ran late. The early customers waited.

In April 2020, Sam Sifton wrote about chile crisp in The New York Times Magazine. The piece was called “Your Quarantine Cooking Needs Condiments.” Gao later told Eater that it sold Fly By Jing out of several months of inventory. Factories in China were still trying to reopen, so she took preorders. She told the food writer Alicia Kennedy the list reached about 30,000 people.

The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp came out on September 26, 2023, from Ten Speed Press. It has 85 recipes. They run from Zhong dumplings and deviled tea eggs to a chili-crisp sundae and a baijiu Negroni. Baijiu is a Chinese grain spirit. In that drink it stands where gin usually does. On June 8, 2024, the James Beard Foundation gave the book its award for visuals. The award names the photographer, Yudi Echevarria.

In April 2024 the company said it was putting three jars into more than 2,000 Walmart stores, at $9.98: Sichuan Chili Crisp, Chengdu Crunch, and Xtra Spicy Chili Crisp. China Daily reported in May 2025 that Fly By Jing then sold about ten products through more than 12,000 U.S. retail locations and platforms. The paper named Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Costco, and Amazon. It also reported that in 2024 the company had been the No. 1 chili crisp brand in the United States.

Spoon the original jar on eggs, noodles, or cold rice. Lao Gan Ma is the other bottle, the Guizhou one a lot of Chinese home kitchens already reach for. How to Choose Chili Crisp is there when you want to tell the jars apart. The warehouses carrying her two-pack this year are in the Costco story.