.susanorlean remembers Yening (Lupe) Liang (1960-2022), the founder and chef of Hop Woo, a restaurant that has been a fixture in Los Angeles’s Chinatown for 29 years.
One late afternoon not long ago, I headed downtown to Hop Woo, a restaurant that has been a fixture in Los Angeles’s Chinatown for twenty-nine years. Thehas been hard on Chinatown. The streets, which used to teem with tourists and neighborhood folks, were empty, with a stillness that felt like being underwater. A pillowy plastic bag blew down the sidewalk, unfettered. Neon jittered in a few windows, not quite bright in the middling light. For more than a century, L.A.
Yening Liang , Hop Woo’s founder and chef, came to L.A. on an indirect path. He learned to cook as a child in Guangdong, and then apprenticed in a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong. His grandfather had emigrated to Mexico decades earlier, and more Liangs followed. In 1978, Liang moved there from Hong Kong to work in a Chinese restaurant in Rosarito Beach owned by his uncle. He took to it.
Liang was always partial to his Spanish-speaking customers, who accounted for at least half his business. About ten years ago, he had a notion to make his menu trilingual. Up until then, the dishes were listed in Chinese on the right, English on the left. But many of his customers couldn’t read either. At the time, no restaurant in Chinatown offered its menu in Spanish. The project was a family undertaking.
The evening I had dinner at Hop Woo, the other customers were speaking Spanish, chattering over a soundtrack of Mariah Carey and Steve Winwood. I had asked Mary what the restaurant’s name, Hop Woo, means, and she told me that it translates roughly as “happy together” or “unity.” A restaurant in Mexico owned by Lupe’s brother had the imposing name of Royal Palace, and Liang’s father had urged him to use it for the L.A. restaurant as well. He resisted.
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