San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SAN FRANCISCO'S LST BANQUET HALLS BANQUE
These restaurants have been Chinatown’s heart and soul. What happens to S.F. if they disappear?
On a Saturday afternoon in late December, Bill Lee walks through his empty restaurant in Chinatown. Though the tables are draped with white tablecloths, the dining room functions more as a storage space. Wedged between tables are stacks of redcushioned dining chairs. Signage, featuring large photos of the restaurant’s dishes, leans against a wall. A lone bottle of hand sanitizer sits on a dining table. A year ago, the scene looked very different — the chatter of locals and tourists filled the room as they feasted on Cantonese and Chinese American dishes.
Opened in 1920 at 631 Grant Ave., Far East Cafe is one of San Francisco Chinatown’s oldest restaurants. Much of its decor remains unchanged from its early days: oil paintings depicting historical scenes from Guangdong (where many early Chinese immigrants hailed from), large hanging lanterns from the province, and a set of dark woodpaneled private booths behind red curtains. Buttons for summoning wait staff remain on the walls, though the bell system no longer works.
Far East Cafe is also one of Chinatown’s last remaining largescale banquet halls, serving as a gathering space for the neighborhood’s many family associations and civic organizations. The dwindling number of Chinatown banquet halls worries community leaders, who fear their loss could devastate the culture and traditions of a community already threatened by gentrification. Ten years ago, there were five: Empress of China, Far East Cafe, Four Seas, Gold Mountain, and New Asia Restaurant. Now, only Far East and New Asia remain.
Lee, 77, who took over Far East in 1999 and added the second floor for banquets, is only the third owner — along with nine other shareholders — in its history. Over the years, thousands of banquets have taken place there. Lee had planned to throw his own event: a 100th anniversary celebration of the restaurant in the fall of 2020. But that was before the COVID19 pandemic and the shutdowns that began in March. Now, instead, sitting in the dim dining room, he contemplates shutting down Far East for good.
“I tell you, I love this restaurant. I have never spent so much time in one place,” Lee says. “I spent 20 years for this restaurant.”
While the entire restaurant industry is struggling for
survival, the pandemic has hit especially hard in Chinatown, which saw business drop months before shelterinplace began. Lee is down to four employees from the 50 or so full and parttime staff he once employed. He has tried to make a go at outdoor dining. Volunteers had been putting finishing touches on a new parklet structure, painted red and trimmed in yellow to match the restaurant. But then the city halted outdoor dining on Dec. 6 in the midst of a coronavirus surge. Lee felt defeated. He didn’t want to close, but he was operating at a deep loss, even after he and his daughter Kathy Lee, the manager, stopped taking their salaries.
Two weeks later, on Dec. 22, news broke that Far East would close permanently on Dec. 31. The next day Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents Chinatown, held a press conference in front of the restaurant, telling Lee that help was on the way. The week before, nine community organizations had written to Mayor London Breed, warning that the situation in Chinatown was dire and asking the city to provide millions in financial aid, as it had done for the Latino community. Peskin and Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer introduced legislation proposing $1.9 million in relief for Chinatown restaurants. Peskin urged Lee to hang on. Lee shrugged his shoulders and seemed to laugh, perhaps wearily, from behind his face mask.
But the speed of government bureaucracy is too slow for Lee. Nearly a month passed before the Board of Supervisors approved the legislation on Jan. 19, another month where he owed tens of thousands more dollars in rent, utilities and more. The city funds will help Chinatown restaurants, including Lee’s Far East, survive for a few months. But then what?
Will enough people be vaccinated by then that COVID19 infections slow sufficiently for businesses to reopen? Or will the situation worsen again?
And there is a larger question: If the banquet halls go, what will become of Chinatown?
Hundreds of banquets take place in San Francisco Chinatown every year — family association gatherings, weddings, red egg and ginger parties, political fundraisers and galas for nonprofits. More modest events might book a smaller banquet hall like Imperial Palace. But the big ones can fill up all 680 seats at Far East Cafe or the 1,000 at New Asia. (Back in the day, some banquets were so large that they filled multiple locations.) A Chinatown banquet, much like Chinatown itself, is a crowded affair, with guests seated snugly at 10tops as waiters in white shirts and vests deploy platters upon platters across the dining room. The dishes are abundant; there is always food left over.
The first quarter of the year is an especially busy time because of Chinese New Year, which typically occurs in late January or early February. Because there aren’t enough bookings available close to the holiday to accommodate everyone, New Year banquets can stretch into April and May. Reservations need to be made a year in advance, sometimes two.
A Chinatown banquet is not just a party with a parade of familystyle dishes. For a community that has endured segregation, racist immigration exclusion that kept families apart and threats of displacement, banquets are loud, bountiful, collective affirmations of community resilience.
“This is a community that traditionally has been very close, very networked, and very organized in certain senses and I think that that connection has been one of the critical elements of why this community has been a successful immigrant gateway for so long,” says Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, one of the organizations that penned the letter to the city asking for help.
Forced to fend for itself, Chinatown long ago established an ecosystem of mutual aid through its family and district associations and its social service and advocacy organizations — a network that still exists today. New immigrants know they can come to Chinatown for resources and opportunities. “All of that is based on the connection and cultural fabric that we’ve been able to weave in this community,” Yeung said. And community banquets are the primary mechanism for celebrating and maintaining those connections, he says.
And while food is always important — each dish in a banquet is imbued with meaning — it’s not about the meal, but the whole experience of Chinatown. About being reminded, even if on a subconscious level, that this
is where the community began.
Chinatown banquets also showcase political empowerment. Laurene Wu McClain, 77, an attorney who grew up in Chinatown, attended banquets in the 1950s and ’60s with her father, the head of their family association and a cofounder of San Francisco’s Chinese Historical Society. She remembers fondly the sound of hundreds of people cracking open watermelon seeds with their teeth at the start of banquets, and the bottles of Belfast Sparkling Cider on every table.
She also remembers how, against the backdrop of the
Cold War, when relations between the U.S. and a newly communist China were antagonistic, the community courted politicians and government officials. Though most Chinese Americans were anticommunist, they feared they’d be viewed as the enemy and incarcerated, as Japanese Americans had been during World War II. They made outreach efforts to the wider American society through events like the Chinese New Year Parade and banquets.
“Sometimes it was the first time anyone would have seen the Caucasian mayor of San Francisco or seen in person one of the members of the Board of Supervisors,” she says of guests at banquets. “That was part of the assimilation process, that, yes, we are our own ethnic group, but we do belong here. We belong here and we invite you to join us in our celebrations.”
Today, many workingclass families who started out in Chinatown have advanced to the middle class and live in the avenues or suburbs of the East Bay and Peninsula where there are newer, more spacious Chinese restaurants and 99 Ranch Markets with wellstocked aisles and hot deli counters. There’s less reason to come to Chinatown and hassle with parking just to buy groceries and a roast duck. Younger generations often prefer getting married in Napa rather than throwing a traditional Chinese wedding banquet.
Yet banquets remain critical to the culture and plexus of Chinatown, connecting community members to the power brokers of the city — and to each other.
“Chinatown is the socialpolitical capital of the Chinese community,” says David Ho, 43, a political consultant. “People don’t go book tables in Cupertino and expect 1,000 Chinese to show up. That’s just not going to happen. First, they don’t have the facilities for it. Second, only Chinatown can get that kind of audience and attention from politicians.”
Ho would know. As a Chinatown activist and a political consultant, he has thrown his share of banquets over the years.
“It’s really about community coming together. It’s about seeing old friends and new friends, and a tie to where we came from, to the immigrant legacy,” says Mabel Teng, a community advocate and former San Francisco supervisor. “Some of us crossed the ocean five decades ago, but some crossed the Pacific five years ago, and we are a community of intergenerational legacy, and also intergenerational leadership.”
New Asia Restaurant, established in 1987 at 772 Pacific Ave., is a newcomer compared to Far East Cafe, and looks it with its high ceiling, shiny gold pillars and multicolor strip lights. A pushcartstyle dim sum parlor by day, it is Chinatown’s largest banquet hall. When banquets began being canceled over coronavirus concerns in January 2020, Hon So, the owner since 2000, grew so anxious he couldn’t sleep.
So, 61, canceled any supply orders he could and stored what had already arrived in freezers. It would just be for a few months, he thought. In July, though, he had to throw it all out, trashing cases of shrimp, beef, chicken, an estimated $100,000 worth of food. Insurance would not cover the loss.
“When I was throwing things out, I was thinking, what will I do in the immediate future? What do I do with a big place like this?” So says in Cantonese. “You have no income, but you still have your bills. The income is not just for me, but for my family, my workers. What can I do to yield income for everyone?”
He thought about how in this new reality of the pandemic, people were lining up to buy groceries and cook at home.
Over two weeks in July, with the help of friends, he cleared tables to make way for shelving and freezers. The next month, New Asia reopened as a grocery store, which allowed So to retain 10 to 15 jobs, a fraction of the 40to 50member staff he had before. New Asia’s proximity to Stockton Street, where many neighborhood markets are located, helped bring in foot traffic.
On a recent Saturday, shoppers browsed the selection of produce, snacks and frozen foods. On the stage, two steps up from the dance floor, packages of toilet paper and rice noodles were stacked on repurposed dining tables. The character for double happiness, a symbol of marriage, was on the wall above them.
“This is the only market with crystal lights,” So said wryly, referring to New Asia’s chandeliers.
Even if his market brings in enough to survive the pandemic, New Asia will be displaced for several years. In 2017, after much advocacy by the late Chinatown activist Rose Pak, the city bought the property to develop it into affordable housing. The plan is for the restaurant to return to the ground floor of a new building, but construction will take at least three years, and the process has barely begun. Proposals from developers were due to the city last month.
Still, New Asia is the rare
Chinatown banquet hall granted a possibility of return. Down the street, Meriwa is now medical offices. In 2016, Mister Jiu’s replaced Four Seas, a popular venue since the 1960s. A year later the food emporium China Live, which contains two restaurants (one with a $185 tasting menu), retail and a bar, opened in what was once Gold Mountain. Empress by Boon was slated to open in 2020 in the iconic Empress of China space, but the pandemic has put a pause on that.
While these new upscale restaurants with Michelin stars and modern takes on Chinese cuisines add a culinary sheen to the neighborhood, they attract a different clientele: a monied crowd from outside who Uber in, eat and leave. They are out of range for residents and for community groups used to paying $40 to $80 a head for an eightcourse banquet.
To be sure, Chinatown has long courted visitors. In a segregated San Francisco, attracting visitors to the neighborhood was key for economic survival and tourism remains important. But a healthy Chinatown maintains a balance between businesses for visitors and its immigrant residents.
“There’s room for Mister Jiu’s and China Live,” says Vincent Pan, 48, the coexecutive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. I know Pan well. We have collaborated on several projects, including on some work for his organization. “We support having a mix of highend and holeinthe wall momandpops,” Pan says. “But the real risk is you lose this one piece and it’s hard to bring it back.”
When the civil rights nonprofit learned that the Empress of China was closing in 2014, it hosted one last banquet that December just for the sake of it. It was one of the last, if not the very last, banquets at the Empress, says Pan.
“We know from other North American Chinatowns, whether it’s Philadelphia or Manhattan, that there’s always a risk of being subsumed by the neighboring financial districts,” Pan says. “And one of the key antidisplacement strategies that has been effective is to have the Chinatowns serve as cultural anchors that bring in a diverse mix of economic
support. Banquets are a flagship of that.”
Banquet halls have played a core role in the Chinatown economy, from providing new immigrants with starter jobs to sourcing from local vendors. Far East Cafe partners with Charity Cultural Services Center to train and employ restaurant workers. Banquets summon the diaspora, whose members tend to make the most of their stop in Chinatown by doing some shopping.
That’s why Chinatown leaders want to preserve the landmark Empress of China building for community access. When John Yee, a real estate investor, bought the sixstory building in 2017, he alarmed many with his initial plans for tech offices. Though Yee grew up in Chinatown, he angered many in the community in 1999 when he tried to evict a building full of lowincome tenants. Malcolm Yeung filed an appeal with the San Francisco Planning Department in an attempt to pressure Yee into discussions over the Empress. Yeung would like to see affordable community banquets return to the space, but Yee says the banquet prices Yeung wants are not feasible.
On Jan. 27, Yeung’s appeal was denied in a 32 vote, resulting in another banquet hall lost to the community.
The Year of the Ox is upon us. Another Lunar New Year in a pandemic, another season of no banquets. Organizations like Chinese for Affirmative Action have held their annual galas on Zoom instead, delivering catered meals to recreate the experience of eating together. Without its usual gatherings, Chinatown has been eerily quiet for the past year. Even with sections of Grant Avenue closed to traffic on the weekends to encourage shopping, the streets are mostly empty, a whisper of the usual hustle.
The question on the minds of many in Chinatown is what will be left when the pandemic finally ends and people come out of isolation clamoring to socialize?
After Chinatown leaders asked the mayor for $11.5 million in financial aid, they met with city officials about reviving the Chinatown Community Development Center’s Feed + Fuel program in partnership with SF New Deal. The program, which ran in spring 2020, paid 34 Chinatown restaurants to cook meals for the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents living in public housing and singleroom occupancy hotels. These
SRO residents share communal kitchens and bathrooms, which makes social distancing impossible.
The center hopes that the $1.9 million relief ordinance, plus $500,000 from the Human Services Agency and $100,000 of the center’s own funds can eventually help 70 restaurants over an eightweek period. If the nonprofit can raise an additional $1 million from individuals and foundations, it will extend the program to 15 weeks.
Feed + Fuel 2.0 launched Jan. 18 with 10 restaurants. Far East Cafe, which participated in the first iteration, joined the new program on Jan. 25, cooking 300
meals a week for $3,000. Far East also participates in similar programs, but the money it receives from these programs doesn’t cover costs — not even close. Lee says he needs to bring in $4,000 a day to keep a restaurant as large as his afloat. One reason he’s been able to last this long is because of an understanding landlord, the Ying On Benevolent Association, of which he is a member.
The family associations that own buildings in Chinatown are not interested in selling them, says Doug Mei, 40, a paramedic firefighter who grew up in a Chinatown SRO and who now works in the neighborhood fire station.
“The reason why they keep them is so they can continue to take care of the new immigrants that come here and continue to carry on the legacy of all those who worked so hard to build this community for us,” he says.
The city’s help is too little, too late, and Asian Americans have been forgotten, he says, a sentiment that many in Chinatown share. Where are the loan programs for Asianowned small businesses, like those the city established for other minority communities, he asks. “We take so much pride as a city in how diverse we are. But we need to take action to preserve that diversity. It’s important that we protect every community and we give every community fair resources all around,” Mei says.
Leaders worry about the elders who rely on dim sum parlors and banquets to stay active with friends. They worry that these restaurants will fade away like the neighborhood’s oncevibrant theaters.
“There’s got to be some adverse impact on the psychology and wellbeing of the community,” says David Ho, the political consultant. On the last Saturday in January, after a week of stormy rains, the sun came out, bringing with it more foot traffic in Chinatown. Outdoor dining reopened and waitstaff wove through pedestrians on narrow sidewalks to take orders. Outside Far East Cafe, Mei and another volunteer worked on the restaurant’s parklet, cutting wood with a circular saw. Lee and his daughter Kathy, who is the restaurant’s manager, carted produce through the dining room into the kitchen.
During a late lunch break, Lee recounted how Far East Cafe has given many new immigrants who didn’t know English their first jobs in the U.S. Back in 1967, he was that new immigrant.
Closing the restaurant would hurt those who arrive in the future, but he wasn’t sure how long he could stay open. What was the point of working just to keep losing money?
“It’s very difficult,” Lee said in a mix of Cantonese and English. “We really don’t want to close, but a fact is a fact. We don’t have money.”