How Los Angeles Rose From Obscurity To Become The Chinese Food Capital of the United States
Based on presentation to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.
I am David R. Chan and it’s a pleasure being back to give another monthly presentation to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. Now if you don’t remember my last presentation I don’t mind, since that was in 1980 when I gave an in-person presentation at the Castelar Street school meeting room entitled “A Post Card View of Chinatown,” showing old historic postcards of Los Angeles and other Chinatowns. I am one of the charter members of CHSSC from 1975, in fact member number 8, previously served on the society’s the Society Board of Directors. Also for several years I represented CHSSC in numerous public appearances on historical and contemporary aspects of Chinese Americans, including on CBS 2 television, then known as KNXT. I also gave the keynote speech at the very first Asian Pacific American Heritage Week commemoration ever held in Los Angeles Chinatown on this very week in 1979. Then in the early 1980s I dropped completely out of sight, thanks to two little kids and an increasingly demanding job, unlikely to be heard from again. However, after an unlikely series of events which I will touch on variously during this presentation, I’m back to talk about Chinese food in Los Angeles and throughout the country.
The subject of my presentation is how Los Angeles rose from obscurity to become the Chinese Food Capital of the United States. However, the story of how we got there involves the broader topics of the history of Chinese people in America, the history of Chinese food in America, the history of Los Angeles, and at times are best demonstrated by my personal familial history. We will learn that these seemingly collateral topics are in fact the heart of what the status of Chinese food is today and why the food on balance is indeed better here in Los Angeles than in San Francisco, New York, or any other place in the rest of the country.
Today, Los Angeles is one of the great cities of the United States and of the world, so to find it as being a leader in anything in particular would be not at all surprising. But Los Angeles has a short history compared to most every other great world city, and the fact that we have the best Chinese food in the country is incredible when you look back at where we started from.
Indeed you only have to look no further than the historic Cantonese names for California’s cities. Naturally the big dog is San Francisco, called Dai Fow, first city, or big city. So was it Los Angeles that took the title Yih Fow or second city? No, that honor goes to Sacramento. Well maybe Saam Fow, or third city? No, that’s Stockton. I don’t think there was a Cantonese fourth city in the United States, but if it were, it would certainly not be Los Angeles. The Cantonese name for Los Angeles is merely Loo Saang.
To look at this from another perspective, most of you heard about the Chinese Massacre of Los Angeles back in 1871, in which a mob of Caucasians and Mexicans rampaged through Los Angeles Chinatown, killing 19 Chinese residents. Not surprisingly, the Massacre was the number one news story of the day across the United States. But it was also the first time anybody outside of California ever heard of Los Angeles. Obviously news of the massacre resonated with the country, with Easterners calling for missionaries to be sent to Los Angeles to civilize the populus.
While the 1871 massacre put Los Angeles on the national map for the first time, it wasn’t a very large spot. That’s because the total population of Los Angeles was 5,000, indeed not much larger than the 4,000 population of Santa Barbara or the 3,000 in San Bernardino, certainly nothing to hint a future world class city would arise here. In contrast, in 1870 San Francisco already had a population of 150,000. And Los Angeles’ population was still only 11,000 in 1880. Even in 1890 the population was just 50,000 and finally hit 100,000 in 1900. To put that in perspective the current population of El Monte is over 100,000.
Putting aside this background for now, let’s turn to Chinese
food. I presume most of you either
remember or heard about mid-20th century Chinese food in America that forms
much of the core of what is considered Americanized Chinese food. It has been
said THAT food was one giant joke foisted on the American public for over a
century, because Chinese-American food was something unrecognizable to more
than 99.9 percent of the people living in China. Because what was passed
off as Chinese food in America was a historical accident molded by Chinese
immigration patterns, US immigration laws and demographic factors which I will
describe in the rest of this presentation.
Everybody knows that Chinese came to America in the mid-19th century during the
California gold rush. What many people don’t realize is that these
Chinese fortune seekers did not come from all over China. Rather they
came almost exclusively from in and around several rural districts in and near Toisan
county, 60 miles outside of the city formerly known as Canton in southern China. To
show you what a teeny speck Toisan is, compare its current population of 1
million to the total population of China of 1.4 billion. Even now, as well as back during the Gold
Rush days, few people living in China have even heard of Toisan. I was in
San Francisco Chinatown recently and I cringed when I saw a restaurant there
called Beijing 49er, because there were no Beijingers in the gold fields, and
for that matter, no Beijinger ever played football for the San Francisco 49ers.
There are three reasons for this narrowly concentrated
migration from China to the California gold fields. First of all,
economic and social conditions in rural south China were absolutely
intolerable, with famine and civil unrest, and people were more desperate to do
something radical like migrate abroad to feed their families. Secondly,
Canton was an international seaport, providing the Toisanese the means to go to
America not available to other Chinese. And lastly, while it was illegal
to immigrate from China, that restriction was effectively unenforceable in
Canton, being so far away from China’s capital in the city formerly known as
Peking.
So for three decades, from the 1850s to the 1880s rural Cantonese villagers from Toisan county and nearby rural areas immigrated in large numbers to America in search of a better economic life, building the railroads and developing California’s natural resources. It was said that in many Toisanese villages, every adult male was in California. But because these migrants were adult males who were almost all in the workforce, their seeming presence in California far exceeded their actual numbers. And as their numbers grew, resentment grew against the Chinese, especially among Irish and other European immigrant workers leading the charge with their signature slogan, “The Chinese Must Go.” This culminated in 1882 when the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Law, which until its repeal in 1943 prohibited most residents of China, as well as Chinese residents of other countries from migrating to the United States.
Now the Chinese Exclusion act did not completely shut off immigration to the United States from China. There were a small number of exemptions, for merchants, students, diplomats and clergy. In addition, US Chinese born in the US were US citizens, and most importantly their foreign-born children themselves were American citizens who were correspondingly not subject to the Chinese Exclusion Laws. In actuality, much of this continued immigration during the exclusion era was illegal, the number cited by one source being 90 percent. Given that most all the adult male residents of many villages made their way to California, that certainly makes sense. Most of these Exclusion era migrants were so called “paper sons” who purchased the identity of either someone who did qualify for the exemption, or as more likely, the identity of a non-existent person who qualified for the exemption.
In any event, virtually all of the migrants of the era, both legal and illegal, involved family and friends of Chinese already in the United States. The product of this is that for a century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese community in the United States consisted of rural Toisanese migrants and their progeny. The importance of this fact cannot be overemphasized, best demonstrated by this reverse analogy. It would be as if, say, all the Americans resident in China came from the rural hills of West Virginia.
With this background it’s easy to see where the joke lies. Chop suey, sweet and sour pork, egg drop soup, moo goo gai pan and egg foo yung were not the national dishes of China, but rather dishes that may have had some roots in the villages of rural Toisan, but were adapted for the local ingredients found in the United States, and ultimately to suit the tastes of the American public which started dining at Chinese restaurants around the turn of the 20th century. And while all stripes of Chinese food are now found in the United States, the old distorted view of Chinese food lives on and thrives with many Americans to this day, and indeed may now even have evolved into its own legitimate genre of regional Chinese food.
Now at this point, I have a confession to make. As a boy growing up in Los Angeles I ate very little Chinese food, and hated most of what I did eat. So you’re probably wondering what makes me qualified to give today’s presentation on the best Chinese food in the United States. The answer is simply that your program director made a horrible mistake in inviting me to speak on this topic. Indeed when somebody I knew from long ago recently found out that I was speaking and writing about Chinese food, they were incredulous. To quote, “David R. Chan speaking about Chinese food?”
Seriously though, how I developed from someone eschewing Chinese food to me speaking here today itself best illustrates the evolution of Chinese food in the United States, and my personal recollections and my family history are a critical part of the discussion. My paternal Grandfather Chan came to the US in 1880 from Toisan, and settled in San Francisco prior to the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws. He brought his concubine into this country in the early 1900s, in violation of the Chinese exclusion laws since only his wife could legally enter the US. Around 1915 they moved to Los Angeles. My maternal Grandfather Wong immigrated as a paper son from Toisan to Los Angeles around 1915 and brought his wife to Los Angeles around 1920. All of which makes me the grandson of three illegal aliens, no surprise based on my previous comments.
When I was born in Los Angeles, the local Chinese population was 5,000, almost entirely all of Toisanese background. In comparison, the local Japanese population was 30,000. Given that the population of Los Angeles was 2 million, that meant only one out of every 400 Angelinos was Chinese. Today there are roughly 600,000 Chinese in Los Angeles, not very many of whom are Toisanese. Growing up as a kid in Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s I really did hate most Chinese food. When my parents took me to Chinese banquets, I would only eat soy sauce and rice. In a way I had a partial excuse because Los Angeles was a minor Chinese community, so many of the better dishes never made it down from San Francisco. Compare the 5,000 Chinese Angelinos when I was born to San Francisco which probably had a Chinese population of about 75,000. Note that the official census count of Chinese in San Francisco is much lower, but is understated by multiples because of the sizable number of illegal aliens in the community who didn’t want to be counted in the census.
And let me explain that my childhood experiences with regard to Chinese food weren’t quite as odd as they may strike you. That’s because back then, when Chinese Americans were a negligible portion of the population in Los Angeles, and the Chinese exclusion laws were in force, me and my contemporaries were highly Americanized. We ate little Chinese food at home and my mom did not have a wok. And virtually all of my relatives, my parents, their Chinese friends, my cousins, aunts and uncles were like myself, American born and Americanized. When I was a boy we didn’t even celebrate Chinese New Year. We didn’t speak Chinese at home, partly because my parents' primary language was English, but also they were afraid that if I learned to speak Chinese, my English might be less than perfect. And they knew that any excuse could be used to discriminate against you if you were Chinese.
This is not to say that we American born Chinese fit right in with the greater community. Indeed, as will be noted shortly far from it. I mention my parents and my uncles and aunts being American born, but back in their day they didn't bother going to college because even if they could afford it, there were no suitable jobs available to Chinese American college graduates. My dad graduated from college at age 33, and my uncles started college well after high school graduation after World War II, which opened up economic opportunities for minorities and women.
Even by the time I came along, we really didn't fit in, particularly in Los Angeles. It’s just that there were so few of us that we Chinese-Americans were more of an oddity than anything. As late as 1970, when I took my first outside job for the summer, after a few weeks of working together, while talking to one of my fellow employees I made a passing reference to my Chinese background. He immediately exclaimed “You’re Chinese? I thought you were Mexican.” Stunned, I asked why he thought I was Mexican. His response was telling, born and raised in Los Angeles, he said I was the first Chinese person he had ever met in his life.
So how did we go from the point where Chinese food in America was this boring mutation that I refused to eat, to today’s Chinese food scene which fully represents the wonderful varieties of regional cuisines in China that we have today? Well not surprisingly, again it all goes back to the immigration laws. As I indicated, Chinese Exclusion was repealed in 1943 as a courtesy to our wartime ally China. But the US operated on a national origins immigration quota system where each country’s quota was based on the proportion of their population presently in the country. Since there were very few Chinese living in the US, the Chinese were given a whopping annual quota of 105 immigrants. So, the 1943 repeal was symbolic, not real and did little to change the face of the Chinese community in the US. Rather we must forward to the late 1960s, where the national origins quota system was replaced by a system that gave the same quota to all countries in legislation enacted in 1965. Suddenly, just as many Chinese immigrants could enter the US under quota as could immigrants from Great Britain.
Since the US and Mainland China were not on speaking terms at the time, almost the entire Chinese immigration quota under the new system was originally filled by migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the effect on Chinese food in America was immediate. Cantonese speaking immigrants from Hong Kong piled into and rejuvenated America’s Chinatowns, bringing a new, different, and delicious form of Cantonese cuisine supplanting the oldtime rural Toisanese dishes that I turned my back on. The urban flavors of Hong Kong were a welcome and stark change from the existing peasant cuisine.
Los Angeles Chinatown was especially transformed by this Hong Kong migration. Because LA’s original Chinatown was torn down in the 1930s to make way for the Union Station, Los Angeles became for decades a city without a true traditional Chinatown. Yes, there was a replacement New Chinatown built on North Broadway, but was not a real, complete community because while there were Chinese restaurants, gift shops and wishing wells, it was largely devoid of Chinese residents, since there was little housing in the New Chinatown. Old Chinatown’s residents had to vacate their homes before New Chinatown was built and were forced to disperse.
Old Chinatown’s residents largely settled south of downtown in neighborhoods next to the Chinese founded City Market Produce terminal, and south to East Adams Blvd. This made the City Market the real, but unsung Chinatown of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s, a Chinatown that few people in Los Angeles knew existed. This lack of Chinese actually living in New Chinatown effectively made it an ethnic theme park where the cast members went home somewhere else after dark. Indeed, I have very few childhood remembrances of visiting New Chinatown in the 1950s and 60s. But when the new Hong Kong immigrants arrived, they actually moved into New Chinatown area, turning an ethnic tourist trap into a true Chinese American community.
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Meanwhile, Mandarin speaking Taiwanese migrants did not gravitate to America’s Chinatowns, which were all Cantonese speaking, and ended up in alternative locations. One notable landing point was Manhattan, where Taiwanese chefs opened up dozens, if not hundreds of Chinese restaurants in New York offering the very first glimpse in the United States of Sichuan and Hunan regional cuisines, though a sliver of Shanghai style food had previously slipped through the Cantonese wall. But this was a faux Sichuan and faux Hunan cuisine as these Taiwanese chefs had themselves fled from Mainland China two decades previously, removing the cuisine once from the original source, both in time and space. Plus these chefs had done their cooking for the military elites of Taiwan, rather than homestyle food, obviously more elevated than the cuisine as a whole.
Because these Taiwanese chefs opened up their restaurants in New York, which had no residents from Hunan or Sichuan, their primary target clientele were native New Yorkers. In adapting their dishes to American tastes, this created yet another degree of separation from real Hunan and Sichuan food. Upper Manhattan went into a frenzy over the new high end Hunan dishes with revolutionary ingredients and recipes, literally garnering wide television news coverage. Meanwhile middle America was swept by faux Hunan and Sichuan cuisine dishes such as hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, General Tso’s chicken, mushu pork and kung pao chicken, now added to the pantheon of Chinese American dishes.
Returning to my personal history, at the same time the changes in immigration laws were taking effect, I was attending UCLA. In my last undergraduate quarter the school offered its first ever class on Asian American studies (tellingly titled “Orientals in America”), reflecting the ethnic awareness and ethnic studies movement that was born in the late 1960s. Immediately I was captivated by the topic of the experience of Chinese people in the United States and the fact that Chinese people in America had their own history. As things turned out, this was one of the triggers to my lifetime study of Chinese food in the United States.
And there were a couple of other critical factors leading me down the Chinese food path. When I entered the work force in 1973, I made the acquaintance of friends at work who were originally from Hong Kong and Taiwan who showed a passion for Chinese food that I had never encountered before. My friends had been the vanguard of the new immigration of Chinese to the United States and they showed me where to find these new and exciting brands of Chinese food. This upgrade in Chinese food sparked an interest in me, as this Chinese food was so much better than what I was used to. And as I started to travel around the United States, I made it a point to eat at Chinese restaurants to the extent possible, as part of a greater interest in seeing what Chinese residents and communities were like throughout the United States.
Even as Los Angeles began to grow as a center of Chinese community and cuisine in the 1980s, San Francisco maintained its edge as new food trends from Hong Kong, such as Chinese seafood restaurants and dim sum palaces spread to the United States. While the gap between San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinese food clearly narrowed in the 1980s, we Angelinos still talked among ourselves about heading up to the Bay Area to try the latest Chinese restaurant openings. My friends and I would talk about the new Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, when we would travel up north, and what we would eat when we got there. I remember when my wife and I took a morning flight to San Francisco to eat at the latest phenomenal Chinese restaurant, ate lunch and dinner there, then flew back home that night.
But San Francisco’s culinary dominance that spanned 135 years was about to end. Towards the end of the1980s, the conversation among Los Angeles Chinese food lovers turned to finding better Chinese restaurants in Manhattan. We’d talk about going to New York, what restaurants we would visit, and what dishes we would order. Of course, we couldn’t fly to New York just for the day like we did with San Francisco, but we did go on one eating trip there once, as did other friends. New York’s time at the top was relatively brief. But clearly that marked the end of San Francisco’s reign.
Any jockeying for Chinese food supremacy between San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York quickly became irrelevant due to one major event—the impending transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997. As the date got closer, anyone in Hong Kong with the means to relocate decided to do so. And starting in the late 1980s, the primary destination for these Hong Kong expatriates was not San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York. That destination was Vancouver, BC, as Canada proved to be a less restrictive entry point for Hong Kong migrants, turning Vancouver into the near culinary equivalent of Hong Kong. Suddenly nobody in the United States talked about going someplace in the US for better Chinese. All eyes were on Vancouver, when could we plan our next trip to Vancouver, and what restaurants should we try and what dishes we would order. The differential was so great that whenever I went to Vancouver to eat Chinese food, I literally didn’t bother to eat Chinese food back home in Los Angeles for a month.
Fortunately, not every great Hong Kong chef landed in Vancouver, and quite a few did make their way to San Francisco and Los Angeles raising the bar for local Cantonese food. More of these migrants made their way to LA such that, Los Angeles’ Chinese food inched ahead over both New York and San Francisco in the early-1990s. However, the ascension of Los Angeles to being the Chinese food capital of the United States really wasn’t that big of a deal, since being the best in the United States was like being the tallest midget in the circus with the crown jewel that was Vancouver just over the border.
On the other hand, despite Vancouver’s food being so much better, unless you lived someplace like Seattle, it’s not like you could go there regularly to eat. Yes, I wouldn’t eat Chinese food in Los Angeles for a month after returning from Vancouver, but I did eventually start eating here again. Consequently, the early 1990s were the start of what would be a golden age of Cantonese dining in Los Angeles, with Hong Kong style seafood and dim sum palaces popping up, capped by the 900 seat Ocean Star restaurant in Monterey Park that opened in 1992, as new and improved dishes continually arriving from Hong Kong and Vancouver.
But even though this golden era for Cantonese food would last a couple of decades, the seeds of its decline had already been planted by new immigration factors. The US finally re-established diplomatic relations with China in 1979, leading to the first migration of non-Cantonese Chinese to the US from mainland China, as migrants began arriving from the more developed areas such as Shanghai and Beijing. By the mid to late 1980s, a few Shanghai and Beijing style restaurants started showing up in Los Angeles. And in the 1990s we saw the appearance of a few real, not faux, Sichuan and Hunan style restaurants. But it was after the turn of the 21st century that the appearance of other Chinese regional cuisines accelerated with virtually every Chinese regional cuisine making an appearance in the San Gabriel Valley as natives of these regions arrived.
So that’s the timeline as to the evolution of Chinese food in Los Angeles and the country, along with my assertions as to where the best food has been over this timeline. But is there any reason for you to believe me given my confession at the start of this presentation? Well, hopefully I can take care of that now, and then we explain why Los Angeles has the best Chinese food today.
As I mentioned, it was meeting co-workers originally from Hong Kong and Taiwan who were used to high quality Chinese food that changed my outlook on Chinese food. Because they had essentially moved into a Chinese food desert, each and every new authentic Chinese restaurant that opened up here was a big event for them, and I happily followed them as we went to each one that came along. And it’s not like there was a new restaurant opening up every day of the week. So as long as you kept up with the new restaurants, you would have covered them all.
Of course as time went on I decided I needed to keep track of the Chinese restaurants I had eaten at, so I started my Chinese restaurant spreadsheet. This listing of Chinese restaurants that I have eaten at now has over 8,600 entries, and includes nearly every Chinese restaurant that has operated in the San Gabriel Valley in the 50 years since the first authentic Chinese restaurant opened up in 1976 in Monterey Park. And most fortunately I had a job which over the course of my career enabled me to visit almost every significant Chinese community in the country, giving me an up close look at Chinese food all over the United States and the ability to compare the food in different regions. And in 2012 something strange happened. The press found out about my Excel schedule with all the restaurants I had eaten at. In a week’s time it went viral around the world, perhaps making me the first celebrity diner, leading to a barrage of publicity including a video documentary with 1.3 million views, such that now with 18,000 followers on Instagram I may be America’s oldest influencer.
So let’s look at the explanation of why the best Chinese food here in the 21st century is in Los Angeles. Strangely, a major factor is the decline of Cantonese food in the United States. Where after a century and a half where Chinese food in America was largely synonymous with Cantonese food, Cantonese food in America is now a page two story, except that it was literally a front-page Los Angeles Times article right the before pandemic, which reported the stunning closing of the San Gabriel Valley’s most iconic Cantonese restaurant, the 900 seat Ocean Star Restaurant, which remains vacant to this date.
Subsequently, another leading dim sum and Cantonese seafood palace, King Hua in Alhambra, fell victim to the pandemic. The space was vacant for over a year, finally replaced by a branch of a night club and restaurant chain headquartered in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province. And then the pioneering upscale banquet hall in Monterey Park which originally housed Hong Kong’s Harbor Village and eventually became Tang Gong also closed, effectively taking the entire three story mall into white elephant status. And most recently Five Star Seafood left its San Gabriel location, displacing and consolidating with the San Gabriel Hilton’s own Chinese banquet facility. That’s a couple thousand Cantonese banquet seats gone there.
The decline of Cantonese food is more vividly demonstrated by another startling statistic. In examining new restaurant openings in the San Gabriel Valley over the past decade, fewer than 10 percent of these openings are Cantonese. Not to say Cantonese food is only 10 percent of the market, as there are a number of large Cantonese restaurants that are less likely to turn over. But clearly in today’s Chinese communities across America, non-Cantonese food is king.
And in that regard, the breadth and depth of non-Cantonese Chinese regional cuisine is Los Angeles is unmatched. Perhaps most importantly, Mainland Chinese restaurant chains are pouring into Los Angeles, often setting up their first American branches here because this is the place to be. A decade ago, the fact that a new restaurant was part of a Mainland China based chain was a novelty, and special notice was made of that fact. Now, it is so commonplace that such parentage is no longer even mentioned.
An example of this is the behemoth Wallace fried chicken chain, which has over 20,000 branches in China, more than the combined number of McDonald’s and KFC locations there. As it turns out, they opened up their first US branch over a year ago in Walnut, and nobody in the food community here knew about it. Nothing in the food press, no mention on any of the food discussion boards. I only found out about it this year, when I read about it in the New York Times. So it was big news in New York that Wallace had opened in the San Gabriel Valley, but a big nothing over here with so many Mainland restaurant chains already here.
Another factor is how Los Angeles pioneers Chengdu Taste and Sichuan Impression in a decade turned Sichuan style food in America on its head, by introducing modern Sichuan style food to the United States and immediately gaining national acclaim. Essentially they rewrote Sichuan style restaurant menus throughout the country, which had been established before Sichuan peppercorns became legal in the United States a little over 15 years ago. Their pioneering status led to Los Angeles being the beachhead for innumerable Sichuan based restaurants to establish American locations.
Now let’s switch gears and talk about all the demographic factors that point to Los Angeles Chinese being the best. While Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York each have over a half million Chinese American residents, only Los Angeles has the San Gabriel Valley. As described by Los Angeles Times food writer Lucas Kwan Peterson in his video on Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley, in which I make an appearance, the San Gabriel Valley is essentially a 200 square mile Chinatown chock full of every Chinese food imaginable.
Now how the Chinese community established and grew in the San Gabriel Valley is a very interesting, but little known and surprising story. In the first half of the 20th century, Los Angeles was one of the most racially segregated cities in America when it came to housing patterns. This is not to say that Los Angeles was the most racist city in the country, not at all. Rather it reflected a peculiar set of local circumstances. Los Angeles exploded in size in the early 20th century, from 100,000 residents in 1900 to almost 1.3 million by 1930. This required the construction of vast numbers of new residential neighborhoods in a short time period.
The dark side of this housing boom was that it so happened to coincide with the rise of something called the racial restrictive covenant that swept across large American cities outside the south, including Los Angeles. Most newly constructed houses in these cities now contained deed restrictions which limited occupancy of the property to members of the Caucasian race . Should a nonwhite person somehow come to occupy the property other than as domestic help, ownership of the property was forfeited to the original developer. Consequently, if you were Chinese, Japanese, Mexican or African American in Los Angeles there were only a limited number of neighborhoods you could live in, essentially those developed roughly before 1915, which was a small part of the local housing stock. If you were Chinese, that means you were you were most likely confined to areas of south Los Angeles or east Los Angeles. It wasn’t until 1948 that racial restrictive covenants were made unenforceable by the Supreme Court.
Even though racial restrictive covenants were made ineffective by the Supreme Court decision, housing discrimination in Los Angeles continued in some communities for many years. And let me demonstrate this with another personal family recollection. I remember when I was in high school in the early 1960s and we were living in the Crenshaw area, which is one area that did open up to minority residents after the 1948 Supreme Court decision. My parents were looking to buy a bigger house a couple of miles away. After viewing a nice house, we got back in the broker’s car and he took my dad aside and told him not to bother making an offer because all of the residents on the block had signed a pact not to sell their house to any nonwhite.
It was against this backdrop that the San Gabriel Valley Chinatown was born. Like the Chinese Americans, Japanese American residents of Los Angeles were restricted where they could live, primarily in central and East Los Angeles in housing developed before the advent of deed restrictions. There was a large settlement of Japanese in East Los Angeles, directly south of the Monterey Park city limit. In the late 1950s, this neighborhood was condemned for the construction of the Pomona Freeway. At the same time these Japanese residents were looking for a new place to live, new homes were being built on the Monterey Park side of the line. Monterey Park was a whites-only community and indeed was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity and a sundown town three decades previously. (For those of you who don’t know what a sundown town was, it was a city whose credo started with a racial slur I won’t repeat, _____ don’t let the sun set on you.)
Nevertheless, some of these Japanese inquired as to whether they could buy homes in the new tract. There were no existing neighbors to stop them as had been the case with existing neighborhoods. And the builders were happy to sell their houses to buyers of all colors, so many Japanese bought new houses there. Shortly thereafter in the early 1960s, another new housing tract appeared in the hills of northern Monterey Park, not far from a neighborhood in East Los Angeles called El Sereno where many Chinese Americans had settled. Similarly, many Chinese Americans started moving into the new Monterey Highlands development, and by 1970 there were a couple thousand Chinese Americans, largely engineers and other professionals, living in Monterey Park.
Propitiously, the establishment of this Chinese American beachhead in Monterey Park was soon to collide with the arrival of new Chinese immigrants permitted under the relaxed new American immigration laws. One of these migrants, an ambitious man named Frederick Hsieh, landed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Shortly thereafter he made his way to Monterey Park where he found a suburban community of hillside homes occupied by many Toisanese Chinese American professionals, and he had a vision. He went into the real estate business, marketing Monterey Park as the Chinese Beverly Hills to potential Chinese buyers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And it worked! Over the years, the flow of new Chinese residents moved largely eastward, to other communities like San Gabriel, Rosemead, Arcadia, Temple City, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and many other nearby communities, creating the San Gabriel Valley we know today.
This unique Chinese mega community sets the stage for an unmatched Chinese dining opportunity in the United States. There are an incredible number of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Nobody knows exactly how many, my best guess is a thousand, not counting boba parlors. This creates a competitive atmosphere for both quality and pricing where marginal players are quickly weeded out.
Other demographic factors add to the quality of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese restaurants. In the past decade and a half, large numbers of wealthy Mainland Chinese have purchased primary or secondary residences in the San Gabriel Valley, skewing the financial profile of the Los Angeles area Chinese community higher than found in San Francisco and New York. These wealthy Chinese have the dollars and the love of food to demand the highest quality Chinese food they can. This was aptly demonstrated by the high end pioneer Bistro Na’s restaurant in Temple City, opened at the end of 2016, yet by 2019 becoming the only Michelin starred Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles area at the time. This has been followed recently by the opening of higher priced Chinese restaurants in several Chinese American communities, such as Array 36, Blue Magpie, Chubby Cattle and Chengdu Impression, as well as other restaurants adding premium sections on their menus, and wagyu replacing flank steak in many of our stir fry dishes.
And lastly there’s the presence of a geographically contiguous generation of millennial and Gen X foodies continually looking for that next great meal that ups the ante. This so called “626 Generation”, named after the telephone area code encompassing most of the San Gabriel Valley, is a food driven group of young Chinese-American adults in a contiguous location without any equivalent in any other American city like San Francisco or New York. Ironically, the 626ers are unaware of how the Chinese San Gabriel Valley is rooted in the history of housing discrimination in Los Angeles as I described in the Times video. The most telling response to that video was a comment of thanks from a 626er who said they always thought their family had previously lived in El Sereno because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park. This short comment shows two related major misconceptions carried by the 626 Generation--first that there was always a Chinese San Gabriel Valley and secondly that Chinese could always live wherever they wanted.
Of course, so far you only have my word and conclusions as to the superiority of Los Angeles Chinese food, but there are more objective indications. Many people might assume Chinese food in San Francisco is better just due to their historic reputation. But the San Francisco Chronicle put out a special Chinese food section which included an article on how San Francisco is lagging behind Los Angeles in the Chinese food scene. Besides quoting an expert named David R. Chan as saying the San Francisco Bay area is behind Los Angeles, there was agreement from a top San Francisco Chinese restauranteur, who in referring to the flood of Mainland China based restaurants opening in Los Angeles says that “Los Angeles is a testing ground for a lot of Chinese restauranteurs. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
The gap between LA and San Francisco was starkly illustrated by last year’s opening of a branch of the famous Mainland Chinese sauerkraut fish restaurant, Tai Er in San Mateo. Opening weekend brought 1,000 diners to the restaurant who congested the streets of downtown San Mateo, with the story being covered by all of the Bay Area newspapers—as a news item, not a food item. Likewise, Tai Er’s plan to open a second Bay Area location was also a widely reported news story. Meanwhile, Tai Er had opened up a branch in Arcadia a year previously, operating quietly in the Santa Anita shopping mall, and not drawing a modicum of attention by their presence. Because of the depth of the Chinese food here, it was no big deal.
Another measure is the flow of diners between San Francisco and Los Angeles. As I recounted, decades ago, the better Chinese food was in San Francisco and we Angelinos would flock to San Francisco for that better food. Now that flow has reversed. I was on a European tour group and met some Chinese from San Francisco who said they regularly drove down to the San Gabriel Valley because the Chinese food was so much better than what they got in San Francisco. When I asked them what their favorite restaurant was, I was stunned because they mentioned a place that I and many others considered to be an ordinary San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant, Baccali Cafe. Meanwhile few Angelinos now profess to traveling north in search of better Chinese food.
There may also be a few out-of-touch New Yorkers who assume their Chinese food is better than Los Angeles, but the only people holding that opinion are New Yorkers who have never eaten Chinese food in Los Angeles, or whose favorite Chinese dish is General Tso’s Chicken. Conclusive commentary as to the relative quality of New York Chinese food was the New York Times feature on Chinese food that opened with the unqualified statement that the best Chinese food in America is in Southern California. And there’s another problem with New York. Chinese cuisine is dynamic. Chinese love their food so much that Chinese chefs are continually coming up with even better, newer dishes. And not only is the first landing place in the United States for these great new dishes usually Los Angeles, but it often literally takes years for those dishes to get to New York.
Of course with large Chinese American populations and hundreds of authentic Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, no Chinese food lover would be unhappy with the local dining in any of these places. And while you might be able to say generally that Los Angeles is better than San Francisco which is better than New York, there are subcategories of Chinese food where the pecking order could differ. For example, while 15 years ago the best dim sum was clearly in Los Angeles, dim sum in the Bay Area now leaves our dim sum in the dust, which is a bit of a puzzlement to me, but which I might attribute the relative collapse of the Cantonese banquet business in the San Gabriel Valley, where that sector is clearly thriving in the Bay Area. But indeed, I myself travel to the Bay Area when I get a hankering for better dim sum.
Los Angeles Chinese food has come a long way in a very short time, or at least it seems like a short time to me since I lived through the process, from a tertiary afterthought among Chinese American communities, to its consensus leadership as the best Chinese food center in America today.
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