KINGSTON, New York, USA- Good sign as more Chinese restaurants in US close shop

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KINGSTON (New York) • More than 40 years after buying Eng’s, a Chinese American restaurant in the Hudson Valley, Mr Tom Sit is reluctantly considering retirement.

For much of his life, Mr Sit has worked at the eatery seven days a week, 12 hours a day. He cooks in the same kitchen where he worked as a young immigrant from China.

He parks his car in the same lot where he took breaks and read his wife’s letters, sent from Montreal while they courted by post in the late 1970s. He seats his regulars at the same tables where his three daughters did homework.

Two years ago, at the insistence of his wife, Ms Faye Lee Sit, he started taking off one day a week. Still, it is not sustainable.

He is 76, and they are going to be grandparents soon.

Working 80 hours a week is just too hard. But his grown daughters, who have college degrees and well-paying jobs, do not intend to take over.

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Across the United States, owners of Chinese American restaurants like Eng’s are ready to retire but have no one to pass the business to.

Their children, educated and raised in America, are pursuing professional careers that do not demand the same gruelling labour as food service.

According to new data from the restaurant reviewing website Yelp, the share of Chinese restaurants in the top 20 metropolitan areas has been consistently falling.

Five years ago, an average of 7.3 per cent of all restaurants in these areas were Chinese, compared with 6.5 per cent today. That reflects 1,200 fewer Chinese restaurants at a time when these top 20 areas added more than 15,000 restaurants overall.

Even in San Francisco, home to the oldest Chinatown in the US, the share of Chinese restaurants shrank to 8.8 per cent from 10 per cent. But it does not seem that interest in the cuisine has faltered.

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On Yelp, the average share of page views of Chinese restaurants has not declined, nor has the average rating.

And at the same time, the percentages of Indian, Korean and Vietnamese restaurants – many of which were also owned and operated by immigrants from Asian countries – are holding steady or increasing nationwide.

The restaurant business has always been tough, and rising rents and delivery apps have not helped. Tightening regulations on immigration and accounting have also made it harder for cash-based restaurants to do business. But those are not factors specific to Chinese restaurants, and do not explain the wave of closings.

Instead, a big reason seems to be the economic mobility of the second generation.

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“It’s a success that these restaurants are closing,” said Ms Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times journalist who wrote of the rise of Chinese restaurants in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, and produced a documentary, The Search For General Tso.

“These people came to cook so their children wouldn’t have to, and now their children don’t have to.”

Mr Sit has not yet found the right person to run the restaurant, and has no immediate plans to close. “To take over Eng’s, you have to keep the heart in Eng’s,” he said. “You need to have a loyalty to the business, not just someone who thinks, ‘I’ll make one year, two years of money, I don’t care’.”

Mr Sit is proud of what he has built. He is proud that his daughters, American-born educated professionals, are working jobs they have chosen, jobs they love.

“I hoped they have a better life than me,” he said. “A good life. And they do.”

NYTIMES