Restaurant eyed for Chinatown landmark

The new owner of shuttered Chinatown landmark restaurant Empress of China is looking into opening a restaurant on the ground floor of the building and using the top two floors for either office space or a hotel.

In a Jan. 25 letter to city Zoning Administrator Scott Sanchez, an architect for the owners sought clarification about what uses would be permitted for the six-story building at 838 Grant St.

The Empress of China, which opened in 1966 when Chinatown nightlife was thriving, occupied 23,000 square feet on the top two floors. It was one of the neighborhood’s most prominent gathering spots before it closed in 2014.

In the letter, architect Jeremy Schaub laid out various scenarios of how the building could be reused, all three of which call for a restaurant on the ground floor and in the basement. The new owner is John Yee, who bought it in August for $17.2 million. Schaub declined to comment.

Since hitting the market, the Empress of China building has been a key focus of groups trying to preserve Chinatown as an affordable and historic neighborhood. Originally, the brokers listing the property raised concerns by marketing it as suitable for creative office space in an effort to lure one of the companies that have made San Francisco’s economy one of the hottest in the world.

But the neighborhood’s zoning, the Chinatown Visitor Retail District, allows for professional service offices — things like insurance sales or accounting firms — but bars what is classified as administrative offices, which would include the city’s hot tech sector. It allows for a hotel, if the property owner obtains a conditional use authorization. Currently, floors three through five house professional services.

Chinatown community groups have been protective of the neighborhood’s strict zoning and have fought proposals from office developers seeking to spread into the area from the adjacent Financial District.

“The Chinatown area plan has protected Chinatown for decades in a way that has not been true in other Chinatowns around the country, which have been disappearing,” said Cindy Wu, the deputy director of the Chinatown Community Development Center and a former planning commissioner.

Wu said her organization is open to a hotel on the top two floors with a restaurant at street level.

“We would expect the property owner would follow the spirit of the plan as well as the actual code,” she said. “We want to preserve the building’s spirit as a community gathering place, and a ground-floor restaurant would meet that spirit.”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents Chinatown, also said he would support the restaurant and hotel concept.

Yee is a well-known Chinatown property owner who made headlines in 2001 when he tried to evict tenants of a residential hotel at 665 Clay St. He eventually sold the building to the Chinatown CDC, which has preserved it as a residential hotel.

For decades, the Empress of China was the top Chinatown destination for weddings and banquets, a status that faded in recent years as larger gathering spaces, with ample parking, were developed in suburbs like Burlingame and Millbrae.