COLUMN ONE : A Feeding Frenzy in the ‘New Chinatown’ : The glut of restaurants has made the San Gabriel Valley the nation’s Chinese food capital. But it’s no picnic for owners who face cutthroat competition, copycats and chef-stealing.

There’s a Chinese restaurant in Rosemead where the Builder’s Emporium used to be, a Chinese restaurant in Alhambra in what once was the Chowder House. The Edwards Drive-In in San Gabriel is now an enormous stucco mall. It has 15 restaurants in it, all Chinese.

In Monterey Park, there are now so many Chinese restaurants that you could eat Chinese every weekend for more than a year and never hit the same place twice. Rosemead has 50 jammed into five square miles. Rowland Heights has 30, give or take one or two.

From pint-sized lunch counters to food palaces the size of hockey rinks, hundreds of Chinese dining spots have opened in the past decade and a half in the wake of the mass settlement of Chinese immigrants in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. If demographers see the San Gabriel Valley as the nation’s prototypal suburban Chinatown, culinary critics now view it as the Chinese food capital of America.

But behind the nine-course banquets and two-hour waits for dim sum, behind the wall-sized marble fish tanks and Gourmet magazine reviews, is a world of increasingly hard-nosed competition waged by some of Southern California’s toughest entrepreneurs. As their market has reached saturation, they have been forced to jockey ever more ruthlessly, slashing prices, shaving profit margins and reaching further afield in search of customers.

Insiders tell stories of sumptuous banquet halls that end each month tens of thousands of dollars in the red, of owners so competitive that they forbid their waiters to eat anywhere else in town. Restaurateurs proffer rare concoctions and imported guest chefs, and despair over travails large and small--from the Asian gangsters who occasionally shake them down to the waiters from Communist China who don’t always get this thing about the customer always being right.

The industry is replete with tales of business done “the Hong Kong way”--finding out which eatery is having the most success, then opening a virtual replica across the street. Chef-stealing is so common that even the greenest American reviewer advises that it is best to eat at a Chinese restaurant within a few months of its opening, before the cook gets lured away with an under-the-table cash bonus and a 10% raise.

And the price-cutting is relentless.

“We used to sell lobster for $15 a pound,” groused Robert Y. Lee, whose 800-seat Ocean Star seafood palace in Monterey Park is one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in Southern California and one of the most critically acclaimed.

“But now, big competition. Everybody is giving away two pounds of lobster for the price of one, so I gotta put on a promotion-- three pounds , charge for one price.”

Behind him, at big round tables lit by crystal chandeliers, a vista of chopstick-wielding diners munching loss-leader lobster stretched as far as the eye could see. Over the clatter of serving trays, the restaurateur sighed: “Now how you gonna do business like that?”

Indeed, the competition has gotten so intense that rivalries begun in the San Gabriel Valley are playing out in other suburbs. It is not by accident, restaurateurs say, that places with duck feet on the menu are popping up in Van Nuys, or that you can get sea cucumber in Santa Monica and live geoduck clams in Irvine.

“Things are so bad in Monterey Park that we are having to expand into the Caucasian community,” sighed Rebecca Leung, whose family recently opened a branch of their San Gabriel seafood house in a Westside mini-mall. VIP Harbor Seafood features nine tanks of fish and a menu geared to the palates of native Chinese. On opening day, clusters of office workers strolled in to check out the place, and encountered the Leungs sacrificing a suckling pig to the gods.

It’s an understatement to say that the local Chinese restaurant business has a long and storied past. Since the first Chinese immigrants landed in the United States in the mid-1800s, drawn by the California Gold Rush and railroad jobs, restaurants traditionally have been a lifeline for newcomers short on English and capital.

“If you’re a new immigrant and you don’t speak English, the easiest thing to do is open a restaurant,” said Kam C. Law, a restaurant equipment magnate who has installed kitchens in hundreds of Southern California’s Chinese restaurants. “You don’t need technical skill, you don’t have to speak fluent English and it’s all cash. The customers eat, the customers pay.”

And where there is a strong Chinese immigrant community, there is a ready--and discerning--market for Chinese food. Scarred by famine, blessed by diversity, the Chinese culture has evolved over centuries into one of the most gastronomically sophisticated and food-centric on Earth; to say hello to a friend in Cantonese is to ask, literally, “Didja eat yet?”

But for generations, when Southern Californians talked about Chinese restaurants, they generally talked either about the limited options in downtown Los Angeles’ Chinatown or the garish, red-and-gold Chinese American eateries of suburbia. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant industry began to take off in the wake of immigration reform and now-famous overseas ads touting Monterey Park as “the Chinese Beverly Hills.”

By 1990, the Chinese population in Southern California had risen to more than 324,000--the nation’s largest Chinese community, more than half of which was centered in and around Monterey Park. As those newcomers spread east--to San Gabriel, Rosemead, Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights--the cultural and culinary landscape was inexorably changed.

In Rowland Heights, past the Puente Hills mall, a cluster of Chinese restaurants materialized in 1992, bright as Vegas, seemingly overnight. In San Gabriel, not even a ban on new construction was enough to stop the transformation of an old drive-in theater into a battleship-sized, Chinese-restaurant-laden mall.

In Monterey Park, Chinese restaurants quickly represented 75% of the dining industry. City officials, under pressure from the city’s non-Asian minority, were reduced to boasting about the Fatburger on the south side of town.

“I used to remember four, maybe five other Italian restaurants down Valley Boulevard, and they’re just not there anymore,” said Claudia Di Pilla of Di Pilla’s Italian Restaurant in Rosemead, where a recent Chamber of Commerce survey counted 85 restaurants, 50 of which specialized in Chinese food.

If it weren’t for the “I-survived-the-layoff” parties at Southern California Edison and a few other nearby businesses, Di Pilla said, she doesn’t know what she’d do for customers. “I feel like I’m running an Italian restaurant in the middle of China,” she sighed.

But for the burgeoning Chinese community--and for fans of Chinese food--the boom has been something to celebrate. Nowhere else in the United States is there such a variety and abundance of authentic Chinese cuisine.

For this, owners say, the public can thank the culinary Darwinism of their industry. Business people in Monterey Park can point out one restaurant after another that has changed hands two, three, four times in as many years.

Statistics are scarce--in part, local officials say, because Chinese restaurant owners are so competitive that they refuse to join area chambers of commerce or create trade associations of their own. But industry anecdotes run the all-too-human gamut of the small business experience--the Hong Kong movie star who thought (mistakenly) that running a Chinese seafood restaurant would be a cinch, the dreamer who learned the hard way that the San Gabriel Valley was not ripe for a place specializing in Taiwanese yam porridge, the Chinatown restaurant heir who took his father’s enterprise regionwide, only to lose one eatery after another in pai gow poker games.

Even the top restaurants, owners say, can only count on a two- or three-year run before their chefs or their customers--or both--move on.

One of those at the top, at least for now, is 888 Seafood Restaurant in Rosemead.

It is a Saturday night at the restaurant and, as usual, a wedding banquet is in full swing. The parking lot--built back when the place was a Builder’s Emporium--is jammed with Lexuses and Mercedes-Benz sedans. The dining room is raucous with backslapping men drinking water glasses of cognac and awash with the perfume of women in evening gowns.

This is the Chinese restaurant of the moment; even the New York Times has hailed its braised Chiu Chow goose and sour plum duck soup. But one glance at the business cards offered by Joseph Lee and Henry Wong hints at the riskiness of their industry.

Though Wong owns the place, along with several investors, both he and Lee carry cards identifying themselves as the “manager.” It’s a preemptive tactic, they said, against Asian gangs, who periodically try to extort protection money from restaurant owners.

If your card says you are the owner, the gangster will pounce, said Wong; if you are only the manager, “you can say, ‘Dunno what you talking about, I just work here.’ ”

As an added precaution, 888 has a security guard in the parking lot. Law, the kitchen supplier, said a lot of restaurants hire guards. A few years back, he said, armed robbers crashed a wedding banquet in Monterey Park and held up several hundred people, forcing the men to hand over their pants. No one was hurt, but it took months for the restaurant to win back its customers.

Lee and Wong say the traps of their trade necessitate constant vigilance and 14-hour workdays (not to mention the less tangible assistance of an auspicious name--theirs translates roughly as “luck, luck, luck”). Things like educating Communist busboys in the niceties of a capitalist economy can be surprisingly labor-intensive, they say.

But throughout the industry, they and others say, the most potent challenge by far comes from the outside. Every day, it seems, a rival restaurant is launched, if not by an established restaurateur, then by some Hong Kong stockbroker with money to burn or a gang of busboys who have pooled their life savings on a big dream.

Rebecca Leung knows all about the power of such rivals, more potent sometimes even than the pull of blood. Three-and-a-half years ago, she opened a Monterey Park cafe featuring what was then the cutting edge of local Chinese food--the curious blend of Cantonese and Continental known as Hong Kong-style coffee shop cuisine.

At Leung’s restaurant, St. Honore, you could get steak in pepper sauce like they serve in Kowloon or a bowl of wonton soup, hot black coffee or sweet red bean ice. Open after hours, St. Honore was soon the most popular of its breed, which in those days was easy because there were only about a half-dozen places like it in the Los Angeles area.

“Now,” Leung fumed, “there are over 15 Hong Kong-style cafes in a two-mile radius of just my restaurant.” The competition, she said, has siphoned away about a third of her customers. But of all her rivals, perhaps the most galling is the Sunday Cafe, which, at the height of St. Honore’s popularity, was opened right across the street by her brother’s ex-business partner--Ocean Star’s Lee.

She and Lee go way back, to the early days of the New Chinatown when her brother was Lee’s protege; for years, she said, her brother wouldn’t eat in her family’s restaurants because Lee forbade him to patronize competitors.

Now, she says, everywhere her family turns, it seems they run into a rival, and more often than not, that rival is Lee, who owns at least five local restaurants. Recently, they decided to open in Rowland Heights. Lee confirms he is hoping to expand there, too.

The experience has left Leung convinced that, to make any money, she and her family must look beyond the San Gabriel Valley--hence the new restaurant on the Westside (an area that Lee said he checked out but rejected because the rents were too high).

They aren’t the first. In fact, in recent years, one local institution, Sam Woo, has honed expansion to such a fine art that it is one of the heavyweights of the region.

Although it is perhaps best known in the San Gabriel Valley, the Sam Woo phenomenon was launched in downtown’s Chinatown by a Hong Kong immigrant named Tam Chek Cheung who had a knack for barbecued duck. Cheung had run a similar place in Hong Kong, and when he emigrated in 1979, he continued to do what he knew best.

He opened a tiny storefront with a big rack of ducks and named it after the Chinese words for “Three Harmonies”--a lofty metaphor for those capitalist prerequisites, “location, timing and customers.” His ads in the local Chinese newspapers offered a dollar dinner special built around a big bowl of soup. Homesick graduate students flocked to the place in droves, and within a year, Cheung had opened a Sam Woo in Monterey Park.

Sixteen years later, there are 18 Sam Woo restaurants, stretching from San Diego to Canada; most are in the San Gabriel Valley, but in the last two years, Sam Woos have opened in Irvine, Van Nuys and Las Vegas. The Sam Woo Seafood Restaurant in San Gabriel, with seating for 900, is one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in Southern California and was the site in 1992 of a fund-raiser for President Clinton.

Except for one outside investor, Alhambra architect Raymond Cheng, the chain is owned and run by its founder’s children and relatives. Cheung--known as “Uncle” by his partners and employees--is 75 and retired, and has passed his mantle to his son-in-law, 51-year-old David Lau of Monterey Park.

Sam Woo, Lau said, has followed two successive strategies: First, it rode the immigrant boom to the San Gabriel Valley. Then, at a pivotal point about four years into its growth, it joined forces with another compatible business, the 99 Ranch chain of Asian supermarkets.

Lau said the joint effort was set up by a mutual friend in Orange County about the time 99 Ranch owner Roger Chen decided to diversify into real estate. Chen needed a popular Chinese restaurant to help anchor his shopping malls; Sam Woo needed good locations, foot traffic and a steady stream of native Chinese customers.

Faster than you can say “synergy” in Chinese, the two businesses took off, pulling in customers even in places like Irvine and Van Nuys, where they initially had expected little crossover appeal.

“So far,” said Cheng, “the response has been amazing. These are predominantly middle-class Caucasian communities, and they’re using the chopsticks and ordering steamed fish with the heads and tails and eyeballs looking at them--and they love it. I guess.”

Less reassuring has been the San Gabriel Valley, where Sam Woo has had to beat back competition. Its barbecue storefronts manage to hold their own. But the big, chandelier-lit seafood-and-dim-sum house in San Gabriel has to vie for customers with at least two other mega-restaurants, and although the food is popular, the profit margin is anorexic, Cheng said.

“Right now,” he said, “we’re breaking even.”

Law, the restaurant equipment contractor, said that for a place the size of Sam Woo Seafood, it is a minor victory even to break even.

Consequently, owners have become ever flashier in their attempts to bring in customers. A chef who billed himself as the Abalone King of Hong Kong recently put on a food fest at the esteemed Harbor Village in Monterey Park. Last year, Sam Woo Seafood trucked in a six-man team of Beijing chefs for a weeklong, $1,000-a-table, 28-course feast based on the preferences of the Last Emperor. For an encore, the cooks stood on a stage carving phoenixes and dragons out of carrots and cucumbers.

“When new people come in, I tell them, ‘Do anything but restaurants.’ It’s that tough,” said Law, plowing into a steaming dish of roast chicken with bean curd and sesame sauce at his latest favorite, MPV Seafood Restaurant in Alhambra. “But they don’t listen. They only want to copy the guy they think is a success.”

Across the table, his preteen daughter--a bespectacled child in full grunge regalia--picked with her chopsticks at a little bowl of steamed rice and marked her place in a paperback entitled “Dear Mom, You’re Ruining My Life.”

“Personally,” she said, grinning wickedly at her dad, “I’d rather be at Pizza Hut.”