A Thousand Chinese Restaurants In The San Gabriel Valley? Is That Too Many? (Or Maybe Not Enough.)
Who knows how many Chinese restaurants there are in the San Gabriel Valley (99% of which serve authentic Chinese food)? That topic came up over a decade ago when Frank Shyong wrote his front page, Column One Los Angeles Times profile of me. At that time we settled on a number ranging from 600 to 800 Chinese restaurants. This was based on the fact that there were about 600 San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant members of a Chinese restaurant trade group, and about 600 Chinese restaurants listed in the San Gabriel Valley Chinese Yellow Pages. Taking into account that there would be Chinese restaurants which were part of both listings, just one listing, or neither of the listings, we settled on an upper limit of 800 restaurants. In the decade plus since then, the number of Chinese restaurants has increased as Chinese have moved into parts of the San Gabriel Valley which originally had few Chinese, so a number of 1,000 or more Chinese restaurants in the ...