Failed Restaurant’s Downfall: Locale Is Behind Its Time

The downfall of Kam Yee’s restaurant on Santa Ana’s East 17th Street is now complete. You can kiss the Texas Cantina goodby. A couple weeks ago, after more than a year of sputtering starts and wheezing revenue, Yee surrendered his license to do business and walked away. If he’d had a white flag, he would have waved it.

Yee won’t even merit a footnote in local business history, but he probably should. When someone looks back on the modern era in search of reasons why small business was in such trouble, Yee’s unassuming restaurant would provide an ample reference point.

At this stage of the game--with Yee saying he and his partners are down $200,000--there are recriminations all around on Yee’s part.

The city did him in.

The state liquor licensers did him in.

The neighbors did him in.

But as I speculated when I first met Yee a year ago, the real culprit is much more insidious than any of the above. Although he didn’t know it, his effort was probably doomed from the start.

Once upon a time along that stretch of East 17th Street, a restaurant that featured music, drinks and dinner would have made it. Indeed, Yee had once operated a restaurant there, featuring Chinese food, but that was years ago.

His mistake was thinking he could re-create the 1970s in the 1990s.

In 1988, Yee sold the property. The new owners succeeded only in angering some of the surrounding neighbors and in getting shut down after investigators discovered that cocaine was sold on the premises. In addition, neighbors complained about late-night noise and disturbances.

By the time Yee re-entered the picture and reapplied for a license in January of 1992, the stigma concerning the site was indelibly etched.

Both the city and the state heard from the public as soon as Yee applied for a license. Among the appeasement plans suggested was one that called for Yee to close by 9 p.m., have security guards in the parking lot and have no live entertainment. Yee succeeded in getting his closing time moved back to 11 p.m., but not to the 1:30 a.m. or 2 a.m. he preferred to maintain the late-night business he thought he needed to succeed.

He opened in November of 1992 but didn’t get his liquor license until the following February, he said. In the meantime, customers came and went, frustrated over not having liquor available to eat with the ribs and Mexican food that dominated the menu.

“After we got the license, business was good for about a month,” Yee said. “But after that, people learned we didn’t have much of anything, no live entertainment, anything. And when we told them we closed at 11, our banquet business dropped off. So, it was pretty tough. People come in late, they don’t work 8 to 5 anymore. The whole dining scene is completely different. So you have to be open longer to get what you can. But the city wouldn’t let us do that.”

The city and state were responding to some neighbor complaints stemming from the previous owners. “We look at the track record of a particular location, and when residents say, ‘We’ve had it up to here and please don’t let them do it again,’ we listen to that,” said Dale Rasmussen, administrator for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Rasmussen says his office made a sincere effort at compromise in Yee’s situation, rather than simply deny his liquor license application.

“The main thing that bothers me tremendously,” Yee said, “is why the neighborhood has so much voice to control my fate. They said they were traumatized (by the former management’s record). What about my partner? He lost all his money. What about the restaurant closing and 10 people who are losing their jobs?”

Ernie Bain is an insurance broker with an office next door to Yee’s ill-fated restaurant. “I remember what was going on before (Yee took over), and they were having problems there,” Bain said this week. “It was getting pretty shoddy and they weren’t taking care of the premises. Then he came in and upgraded everything, and I felt it was an improvement to the neighborhood. You didn’t see anyone wandering around back there (behind the restaurant), because he was taking care of it and he did upgrade the parking area.”

Bain thinks Yee is on the wrong side of history right now. “The area we’re in here, it’s very difficult to attract steady customers because we don’t have the commerce here. The only way to make a go is if you were somewhere else and you had a following that came with you. I think where he’s located, I just don’t think it’s a good location. I just don’t think people are coming to this area right now. It’s just not an area you come to at night.”

What he’s saying is that in another time, another place--such as the way Yee remembers the area being 20 years ago--a new restaurant might have made it. Live music and beer until 1 a.m. wouldn’t have automatically translated into trouble.

As Kam Yee has discovered, that combination today along East 17th Street is just a welcome mat for another empty storefront.