Valley Boulevard: Los Angeles' Nine Mile Restaurant Row

Valley Boulevard: Los Angeles' Nine Mile Restaurant Row - Menuism Dining Blog, July 16, 2018

 

Many communities across America have what is locally referred to as “Restaurant Row.”  In most cases this is a block of two with an unusually heavy concentration of restaurants and other eateries.  In some cases it’s more extensive, such as the famous Restaurant Row on La Cienega Blvd. in Beverly Hills, or the five mile stretch of Belt Line Road in Addison, Texas with dozens of restaurants.  But nothing can compare to the string of Chinese restaurants along a nine mile stretch of Valley Boulevard in the San Gabriel Valley outside of Los Angeles.

 

How many restaurants along Valley Boulevard? 

 

If there is a main street to the Chinese community in the San Gabriel Valley, that’s Valley Blvd., which generally runs straight through several different cities.  The street itself runs nearly 25 miles eastward from the eastern part of the city of Los Angeles to the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.   Nobody has done a count of Chinese or other restaurants along the nine-mile portion Valley Boulevard running from Alhambra to El Monte, or of the total number of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley.  There are Chinese restaurant directories, such as from the Chinese Restaurant Association and the Chinese Yellow Pages, but these are clearly too incomplete to provide any meaningful count.   My best guess is that there are as many as 800 Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, of which 200 Chinese restaurants are on Valley Blvd.  That’s over 20 Chinese restaurants per mile for nine miles!   

 

Of course a Chinese restaurant row of 200 restaurants doesn’t appear overnight.  But in some respects the Chinese restaurant buildup was remarkably fast.  Long before the San Gabriel Valley was settled by Chinese-American residents, Valley Blvd. was a major thorofare that traversed the contiguous cities of the San Gabriel Valley.  As such, it was a vibrant commercial street with many different types of businesses, including restaurants, and even an occasional Americanized Chinese restaurant.  

The history of Chinese restaurant row

Chinese and other Asian Americans established their first San Gabriel Valley beachhead in the late 1960s and 1970s in Monterey Park, whose northern border is just blocks south of Valley Blvd.  Consequently, the first wave of authentic Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley bypassed Valley Blvd., and it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Fu Shing in San Gabriel and Ocean Seafood in Alhambra were the pioneer settlers of what was to become the Chinese restaurant row. 

 

By the mid-1980s a few more Chinese restaurants began to open up in freestanding locations on Valley Boulevard in Alhambra.  But what really fueled the development of Valley Blvd. as THE street for Chinese dining was the construction of shopping centers designed to house multiple restaurant operations.  An early example was the mid-1980s Valley Square, a horseshoe shaped shopping center developed adjacent to the sprawling Old West themed Crawford’s Corner shopping center on the corner of Valley Blvd. and New Ave in Alhambra.   Valley Square featured two arms with roughly 10 compact store spaces each, with virtually all of the spaces on the east side occupied by Chinese eateries.

 

Chinese restaurant centric shopping centers on Valley Blvd. really kicked into gear in the city of San Gabriel, just east of Alhambra, first with the late 1980s opening of Prospect Plaza, but was marked with an exclamation point with the 1992 opening of the massive San Gabriel Square shopping center (popularly known as Focus Plaza) on a former drive-in movie location.  The opening of San Gabriel Square led future Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathon Gold to proclaim the inclusion of  San Gabriel as one of the great food cities of the world in the same breath as Paris, Tokyo and Rome.  And as the Chinese sphere of influence moved eastward, so too did the presence of Valley Blvd. Chinese restaurants, into adjacent cities of Rosemead and El Monte. 

 

The epicenter of Chinese restaurant row 

Built on a former drive-in movie theater, San Gabriel Square is a sprawling two level, 12 acre shopping center that is home to fifteen restaurants, including the banquet sized dim sum and seafood palace, Five Star Seafood, as well as a branch of the international Little Sheep hotpot chain.   And in a separate building directly in front of San Gabriel Square are an additional three eateries. 

Life Plaza, on the next block west, is home to seven spacious Chinese restaurants, anchored by the ornate Shanghai Seafood Village #1 Restaurant, and a branch of the popular hotpot chain, Boiling Point.  Across the street from Life Plaza is the San Gabriel Hilton, whose Trinity Restaurant belies the powerful kitchen that makes the hotel’s ballrooms among the most popular Chinese banquet facilities in the San Gabriel Valley. The hotel’s adjacent 3-story shopping center is itself a gold mine with ten more restaurants, including the popular Chinese gastropub Chang’An.  Immediately west on the next block is the pioneering Prospect Plaza where one finds a grouping of another nine Chinese restaurants including Mian, the acclaimed groundbreaking Sichuan style noodle restaurant, and rare Wuhan (Tasty House) and Lizhou (Happy Kitchen) regional style Chinese restaurants.  So, in just a short three block stretch of Valley Blvd. you can walk by 45 Chinese restaurants. 

 

What not to miss along Valley Boulevard

The top Chinese restaurants all along Valley Boulevard are too numerous to mention, but I'll offer a few highlights.  

On the Alhambra portion of Valley Blvd. are the two Sichuan style restaurants, Chengdu Taste and Sichuan Impression, which essentially have brought a new style of Sichuan cuisine to the United States, elevating Sichuan food in Los Angeles far ahead of anywhere else in the country.  

Outside Alhambra's Savoy Restaurant, crowds wait for hours for a chance to dine on their Hainan chicken, so good that people stop by on their way to the airport to share with friends and relatives living in far-flung places.  

The original Alhambra location of 101 Noodle Express, popularized the now ubiquitous 21^st century staple, the Shandong beef roll.

To the east of San Gabriel, Valley Blvd. makes its way through the city of Rosemead, featuring Hunan heavyweight Hunan Mao, and noodle specialists JTYH Restaurant and Noodle Boy.  While the parade of Chinese restaurants continues into El Monte, the restaurants here are smaller and less well known. 

 

I know you're about to ask

For those who are wondering, yes, I have managed to eat at virtually each and every one of these Valley Blvd. Chinese restaurants.  But when I started eating on Valley Blvd. there were only two Chinese restaurants, so it’s been manageable just having to keep up with all the restaurants as they opened up over the years.  You couldn’t repeat that feat today, as a bunch of new restaurants would have opened up before you even worked halfway down the street.