In the 626, an era of food fades
San Gabriel Valley’s once-thriving dim sum halls vanish as tastes and traditions change.
as one of Monterey Park’s premier dim sum destinations: massive weekend crowds, wobbly Lazy Susans and wheeled carts packed with cheong fun, barbecue pork buns and chewy chicken feet.
On May 1, the Cantonese eatery abruptly closed its doors.
“Traditional Chinese banquet spaces aren’t as sought after as they used to be,” Sunny Wan, president of the restaurant’s operating group, said in an email. “It became more and more difficult to manage such a largescale restaurant.”
Ocean Star is just the latest traditional go-to spot to shutter in the Chineserestaurant-dense San Gabriel Valley.
Legacy restaurants and large-scale banquet halls, which frequently are Cantonese-style dim sum specialists, have been hit especially hard: Empress Har
bor Seafood Restaurant and Lincoln Seafood in Monterey Park, Embassy Kitchen in San Gabriel and East Gourmet Seafood in Rosemead all closed within the last year.
Restaurant owners and diners have cited a number of factors in explaining the rash of closures: labor issues, financial challenges and changing consumer tastes among them.
Empress Harbor, just down the block from Ocean Star, served its final meal in April. It opened in 1988 on the top floor of the Atlantic Place Shopping Center, a mini-mall of brown concrete and reflective glass on the corner of Atlantic Boulevard and Garvey Avenue. The 10,000-square-foot restaurant once hosted banquets, weddings and other gatherings of up to 500 people.
Takashi Cheng, a representative of the restaurant’s parent company, cited increasing costs and maintenance issues in explaining the decision to close. Empress Harbor’s website says it is looking for a new location.
On the message board Food Talk Central, speculation is rife as to the reasons for the closure epidemic. One is that the restaurants, many of which were opened by immigrants decades ago, are built on a back-breaking labor model that secondand third-generation residents are unable — or unwilling — to maintain.
The kitchens “rely on employees agreeing to work on ‘salary,’ but it usually means they do six days a week and usually double shifts every day except maybe one half day a week,” one commenter wrote. “Nobody wants to work like that anymore, especially younger cooks.”
It may also be that tastes are changing.
Cantonese cuisine, until relatively recently, has been the most popular style of Chinese cooking in the U.S.
In the 19th century, Chinese immigrants arrived primarily from Guangdong province in southern China (where Cantonese is spoken), particularly the rural Taishan region. Decades later, dim sum halls and the smell of butane had become fixtures of urban Chinatowns.
Luxurious Cantonese banquet food — abalone, sea cucumber, jellyfish — was a staple of weddings and special occasions.
Today, with a wider representation of immigrants from other parts of China, different regional cuisines are shining in the U.S. — at the expense of Cantonesestyle cooking.
David Chan, an L.A.based Chinese restaurant obsessive (he estimates he’s eaten at more than 7,000 Chinese restaurants), keeps an unofficial tally of the places that are opening in the San Gabriel Valley. Cantonese cuisine, he said, has fallen out of favor.
“Over the last two years, do you know how many [new restaurant openings] are Cantonese?” he asked. “Ten percent.”
He estimated that a majority of new restaurants are either Sichuan or hot pot restaurants, or both.
There are also generational changes at play — many younger Chinese Americans don’t want to have traditional Chinese wedding banquets.
“That used to be the format for all the weddings in the SGV,” said Wan, the Ocean Star restaurant group’s chief. “Nowadays it’s different.”
Chan said he experienced the shift firsthand with his own children. “We basically forced my son to have one because we owed so many people from so many decades,” he said.
Chan’s son had a 45-table traditional banquet at the San Gabriel Hilton. His daughter, less eager to go the traditional route, decided to pay for her own wedding — in Malibu.
Cheng of Empress Harbor bemoaned the loss of tradition.
“If you look at all the closures, it’s saddening. You’re not going to have a venue that can have upwards of 40 tables for a Chinese-style wedding banquet in the future,” he said. “We don’t do enough to preserve the traditional aspect of Chinese culture.”
But Chan remains largely optimistic, noting the sometimes shocking speed with which another restaurant moves into a vacated space.
“It amazes me to see a sudden closure, like Noodle Boy, and the next day you see a sign that announces ‘Noodle Palace.’ The place is taken,” he said.