San Gabriel Hotels Usher New Phase in Chinese Dining

San Gabriel Hotels Usher New Phase in Chinese Dining - Menuism Dining Blog, October 15, 2018

Hotel dining isn’t generally an interesting topic of discussion.  With some notable exceptions, people partaking in restaurant dining are taking the easy way out after a tiring day of travel and don’t want to bother to look for someplace to eat.   Meanwhile, hotels might not particularly want to operate an on premises restaurant, particularly if they don’t have conference facilities, but know that they really need to have an eating alternative for tired and hungry guests.    

In the context of Chinese-American communities, hotel dining has been historically non-existent because hotels themselves in Chinatowns new and old have been non-existent.  While Chinatowns have been a tourist attraction for well over a century, few, if any tourists would have any desire to secure lodging there.   And those few lodging facilities that historically opened up in Chinatowns during the 20^th century were motels without any kind of amenities, such as the pioneering Royal Pacific Motor Inn on Broadway in San Francisco Chinatown and Moytel in Los Angeles Chinatown.  Particularly with the plethora of local Chinese dining opportunities steps away from these motels, there obviously was no need for on premises dining.  

The Holiday Inn (since converted to Hilton) which opened up on Kearny Street in San Francisco Chinatown in the early 1970s made for an interesting exception.  Even though it was physically located in San Francisco Chinatown, the parcel of land on which the hotel was built was previously the site of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice and city jail, so it wasn’t functionally a part of Chinatown.  When the hotel opened, it was christened the Holiday Inn Financial District, without reference to its Chinatown location.  The hotel has never had a signature Chinese restaurant, and indeed still lacks a Chinese food option.

The third floor of the hotel is occupied by the Chinese Cultural Center, headquarters of the Chinese Cultural Foundation of San Francisco.  That center was built as a concession to the local Chinese community which ardently fought the development of the hotel, believing that the site should be specifically used for public housing or social services.   I still remember in the early 1970s even after the Holiday Inn was completed and open for business, seeing red stenciled silhouettes of the Holiday Inn plastered all over Chinatown saying “End The Inn.”

In the intervening years, hotel chains largely avoided Chinese American neighborhoods.  Even with the suburbanization of these communities, full scale, branded hotels were nowhere to be found in communities like the San Gabriel Valley outside of Los Angeles, which despite hundreds of thousands of Chinese residents, depended on motels and small hotels to fill in the lodging demand.  It wasn’t until 2005 that the San Gabriel Hilton opened up, giving the region its first branded international hotel chain.

While the San Gabriel Hilton did include the obligatory on-premises dining facility, Trinity Restaurant, in a way it didn’t add much to local Chinese dining since it was mostly empty and did not serve Chinese food at all during the week (with only a pricey weekend Chinese buffet), not surprising given its location at the epicenter of Valley Boulevard Chinese dining. Trinity Restaurant does serve a very modest weekday Chinese lunch buffet.

For more than a decade, the San Gabriel Hilton was the only international hotel chain to locate in the San Gabriel Valley, but suddenly a spate of hotel openings is in progress, triggered by a surge of tourists from Mainland China who prefer to stay in the San Gabriel Valley, perhaps fueled by the Chinese stomach to be proximate to all of the Chinese restaurants they had heard about in the region.  The past year has seen the opening of two branded hotels, a Holiday Inn Express in El Monte, and a Sheraton in San Gabriel, with two others under construction, the Courtyard by Marriott in Monterey Park and a Hyatt in San Gabriel, and a Doubletree ready to break ground in Monterey Park.

As part of company protocol, all of these international hotel chains will offer on premises dining facilities.  But based on the initial two openings, these hotels will for the first time add to the local authentic dining stock of the Chinese community.

For example, the Holiday Inn Express in El Monte, the first of the two to open, tapped an existing local Chinese restaurant, Tasty Choice, to anchor their restaurant dining.   Having a hotel establish a new branch of an existing Chinese restaurant isn’t a new idea—it’s been done numerous times by Las Vegas casino hotels, with success stories such as K & J Kitchen’s branch in the Rio, as well as stunning failures, such as Sea Harbour in Caesar’s Palace.   Tasty Choice is one of the few Wuhan style restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, a cuisine known for dry-pots (hot pots without the broth). Tasty Choice's existing operation was in one of the numerous Valley Blvd. strip malls and is not especially renown.  A sidelight is that Tasty Choice has labeled this location, admittedly rather upscale, as their “Flagship El Monte” location, which is quite humorous to Los Angeles oldtimers, since the only thing El Monte was previously known for was El Monte Legion Stadium, legendary site of Latino rock concerts in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Likewise, the next-to-open San Gabriel Sheraton has clearly showed its intention to take Chinese dining seriously.  Initially they announced they would be the site of the first US branch of Ba Shu Feng, a famous Sichuan based Chinese restaurant chain.  Indeed, when the hotel opened earlier this year, a visit to the hotel website implied that Ba Shu Feng had opened up, and you could walk into the brightly lit, furnished restaurant dining room.  However, in fact Ba Shu Feng never opened, and months later announced in its stead was Opal, an upscale Cantonese restaurant, which opened its doors a few weeks ago.   The initial reviews have been outstanding, with its Peking duck already proclaimed by some to be among the best in the area.  Combined with its large, beautiful dining room, Opal is indeed likely to become an upscale destination restaurant of which the San Gabriel Valley can be proud.

With so many existing Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, it would not have been surprising to see these new hotels open up without impacting the local Chinese restaurant scene.  But it seems that these international hotel chains see value in maintaining high Chinese restaurant profiles.  "We know we are in an Asian community with many restaurants; however, Chinese food is a very generic term,” Sheraton Los Angeles San Gabriel Hotel general manager Wanda Chan said in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “You see a lot of Chinese that is actually Shanghainese, Szechuan, the different types of Chinese food, but we found that Cantonese food, in particular, is very hard to find in this community at this level.”

I'm excited see what the next hotel openings will bring.