Little Tokyo Landmark Plans a Comeback

The meeting took place in Little Tokyo, at a Chinese joint called the Far East Cafe.

Private eye Philip Marlowe--this time played by Robert Mitchum, in the 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely”--was having lunch when, as Marlowe recalled, “a dark shadow fell over my chop suey,” a hulking ex-con with a bone to pick, the character Moose Malloy, played by Jack O’Halloran.

Although Mitchum and O’Halloran played their parts well, only the Far East Cafe brought absolute authenticity to its role.

Opened in 1937 in a building erected in the 1890s, the Far East Cafe is one of the oldest and most beloved of the city’s venerable eateries. Closed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake wrought havoc on the building, the restaurant on the north side of 1st Street between San Pedro Street and Central Avenue is scheduled to stage a blockbuster comeback as its old self: a dim Depression-era chop suey joint, full of low-rent intrigue and proud of every bit of it.

Even though the building has been closed for nearly 10 years, out in front the original two-story vertical neon sign still declared “CHOP SUEY,” with an arrow pointing to the door. Although the restored eatery won’t have Depression-era prices, the ambience will be unchanged, with the original high wood-paneled booths and naked fluorescent light tubes. The ancient electric ceiling fan will still circulate the smells from the kitchen, but the remodeling will include real air-conditioning.

In the shadow of Parker Center, the Far East was a gritty little stage-set for most of its six decades--not only in movies but probably in back-room deals of political intrigue and bureaucratic revelry.

In 1937, Look Mar Jung, a native of Canton, was 22. He, a brother and several cousins opened the Far East Cafe in a former hardware store, located on the bottom floor of a three-story building.

A Chinese restaurant in Little Tokyo struck no one as odd. The Jung family opened for business in the part of town where, it is said, the fortune cookie was invented. Nearby, three other Chinese restaurants were already clustered: San Kwo Low, Lem’s and Nikko Low. Family and friends of the Jungs thought the eatery would fold, but it quickly became a downtown institution.

“Japanese people like Chinese food,” Jung once said from behind the cash register. “That’s why the Far East is in Little Tokyo, not Chinatown.”

The upper floors of the building were given over to a hotel, first called the Queen and later the Nihon, a 24-room residential hotel. Over the years, the rooms housed Japanese immigrants: bachelors, dentists, workers in the bustling furniture and hardware industry, and even students of a chick-sexing school. (Determining the sex of young chickens was a tricky craft in days past and required intensive training.)

“Saturday nights were social gatherings at the Far East,” said Jack Kunitomi, a retired teacher who grew up in the area. “We’d play a game of baseball, head for the bathhouse around the corner at Jackson and San Pedro streets, and then go to the Far East, stand in line freshly bathed, hoping to meet girls.”

They would be joined by students from the chick-sexing school--also located in the hotel--who would graduate and be paid handsomely for being able to discern in a few seconds between tomorrow’s hens and roosters. Former students rolling in the dough would always return to the Far East, “driving a brand-new car,” said Kunitomi. “They made so much money that they only had to work for a few months each year.”

Inside, tight-lipped waiters dished up an Americanized cuisine of egg flower soup, chop suey, chow mein, fried shrimp, fried rice, almond or sweet and sour pork, and egg foo young.

As the Japanese were hustled out of Little Tokyo and into internment camps at the start of World War II, the Far East stayed open, but business was not good. It catered mostly to women, students and professional chick-sexers--whose work was so crucial to the U.S. wartime economy that they weren’t sent to internment camps, as most Japanese American professionals were, including physicians.

Good times returned after the war when Japanese families did, often renting the restaurant’s mezzanine for wedding receptions and wakes. For those who came back from the camps penniless, the Jung family made living space in the basement and gave them food on credit, allowing them to pay when they found jobs. Then the Civic Center expanded, adding more hungry bureaucrats to the daytime population.

The world changed, Los Angeles changed, but the Far East was set in its ways.

It never even considered dropping the term “chop suey,” an Americanization that many Chinese regard with contempt. When other Chinese restaurants began taking down their varnished-wood partitions to make room for more seating, the high, wood-paneled booths stayed at the Far East.

Sometimes small changes were forced upon the Jungs. Curtains were hung around the booths as privacy for local lawmakers, reporters and police officers who packed .38s on their hips. The Far East soon developed a well-deserved reputation as a place where political deals were cut behind the curtains. But the fire marshal ordered them taken down in the late 1950s. The curtain rods remain to this day.

In the early 1960s, after decades of renting the restaurant premises, the extended Jung family bought the entire three-story building. The two upper floors, badly water-damaged, had decayed into a tomb for pigeons.

The Jungs always thought of themselves as purveyors of chop suey, not caretakers of history. But beginning in the 1970s, Hollywood and history buffs discovered the Far East--and the rest of the block, for that matter.

In 1974, “Chinatown,” starring Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, was the Far East’s first cinematic role, followed by “Farewell, My Lovely” the next year. Since then it has been used in location shots in other movies; a 7-Up commercial; a Lionel Richie video; and in an episode of the 1987 television drama “A Year in the Life.” Jung himself appeared in two productions, but both times ended up on the cutting-room floor. The restaurant’s most recent role came in 1993, the year before it closed, in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.”

In 1995, the Far East and 12 other edifices along 1st Street--where Chinese and Japanese history can be found underfoot, in brass-lettered inscriptions embedded in the sidewalk--were designated a National Historic Landmark, making the properties eligible for restoration grants and loans.

Like the restaurant beneath it, the upstairs former hotel is humble but retains graceful hallmark features, among them a grand staircase with Victorian gingerbread banisters, sculpted wooden door frames, wainscoting and a gable skylight.

The Jung family recently donated the building to the Little Tokyo Service Center’s Community Development Corp., a nonprofit organization specializing in affordable housing and economic development. The Jungs will lease back the restaurant space and reopen the Far East when the $2.8-million restoration is completed at the beginning of next year.

“We still have all the recipes,” said Andrew Chong, a grandson of one of the founders and the principal Jung family spokesman, who was a busboy and waiter at the Far East and is now a La Puente optometrist.

Perhaps for the reopening, the fortune cookie--said to have been invented in 1916 just a few doors away from the Far East--will bear a prediction of good fortune for an L.A. landmark.