![]() The fried chicken (they managed that too) is crackly skinned and juicy, slightly pink at the bone, served with a little saucer of peppered salt and a garland of pastel-colored shrimp chips. ![]() The kitchen comes up with the clay pot dish after all, fat oysters and melting chunks of pork belly bubbling in a superheated vessel. The squid with spicy salt is crisp-crusted and tender, and the pea shoots flash-fried with garlic are fresh and vividly green. The odds are not ever in your favor.īut then the food starts to come out on its long, perilous journey from the kitchen, and it seems to be pretty good. ![]() The Chinese friend in your party, already kind of sore that you have dragged her here instead of Szechuan Impression, begins to scowl. Maybe we can do a crispy skin fried chicken? Let me check with the kitchen.” “What kind of steamed fish do you have today?” You are handed a menu … from Ocean Seafood. You know that the Kenny G blasting from the ceiling will haunt your dreams. There are more chandeliers in the dining room than people. Rows of empty tables yawn into the distance. When you walk into the foyer, a well-dressed hostess leads you into the dining room.Īnd then you realize: It is not 1991. The escalator up from Hill Street hums again, and the stone foo dogs flanking the restaurant’s doors wear bright ribbons around their necks. ![]() When you nose up the long, long ramp to the parking lot, it does feel like 1991 again, down to the secret Zen garden, the filtered open-atrium light, and the glass elevator ride down to the restaurant. And if you want to expand your banquet business - the new owners also control Ocean Seafood down the street - it’s easier to move into an already existing 600-seat restaurant than to build one from scratch. The area does border the rapidly revivifying areas of downtown. Chinatown is going through a revival right now, mostly led by non-Chinese restaurateurs like Roy Choi and Andy Ricker drawn to the grand old spaces, but with potential for Chinese businesses too. So was I surprised when Empress Pavilion reopened last fall? Not especially. I barely noticed myself - I had moved my own dim sum custom out to King Hua, Capital and Sea Harbour almost a decade earlier. When Empress closed a couple of years ago, it seemed inevitable. The mall lost its splendid 99 Ranch market, other tenants moved away, and when the escalator stopped working a few years ago, nobody bothered to repair it. They claimed it during the years when the Dungeness crab baked with garlic and noodles was the best dish in Chinatown, the pan-mashed bean curd with shrimp was among the most delicious things I had ever eaten, and the griddle-fried taro cakes at dim sum could be mistaken for crisp-edged clouds.īut then the restaurant kind of did go downhill. ![]() Of course, some people always claimed Empress Pavilion was going downhill - demography is destiny. The answer to the question, “Do I have to drive to the San Gabriel Valley?” was: “Not necessarily.” In its early years, you would typically wait an hour or more for a table on dim sum Sunday mornings, and in the evenings, the vast hall would be subdivided for wedding banquets and business dinners that featured the best class of bird’s nest soup and such oddities as Dragon and Phoenix platters that occasionally included real snake.Įven as the focus of the Chinese community moved 10 miles east, and the food malls that lined Broadway were eclipsed by the shinier complexes in the new Chinatowns of San Gabriel and Monterey Park, Empress’ live scallop dishes and sun-dried abalone held their own against the other Hong Kong-style competitors Harbour Village and Ocean Star. Empress Pavilion is the biggest restaurant in Chinatown, a glittery, hangar-size seafood palace built at the height of the late 1980s boom. ![]()
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