Seattle’s Shanghai Garden will close after decades in Chinatown ID

Shanghai Garden Restaurant, a family-run favorite in Seattle’s Chinatown International District since 1990, has announced its permanent closure at the end of May. 

The reasons for the final farewell are familiar ones in the world of mom-and-pop operations in Seattle nowadays. “Our business hasn’t been the same since the pandemic,” co-owner Christine Su explains. “And then with food costs going up, and then also wages, it’s been really hard.”

The city’s restaurant staff shortage also comes into play, as one of two chefs who’d cooked in the Shanghai Garden kitchen since 1996 retired and has proven difficult to replace.

Su also cites potential customers’ fears about crime in Seattle — which she says, emphatically, are unfounded — as well as increasingly difficult parking as factors in business dropping “so dramatically.”

The restaurant also didn’t utilize delivery services after a bad experience.

“A lot of people are geared towards that — whatever is easy, right?” Su says. “Because we don’t use (delivery services), maybe we also lost customers.”

“Times are changing,” Su also acknowledges, “and I feel like people’s taste buds and the way that they want to eat is different, too.”

The decision to close was not an easy one. “We’re really sad about it,” Su says, “because we know that there’s so many families that have been dining at our restaurant where we’ve seen them bring their kids, and now their kids are older, and now they’re bringing their kids. 

“We’ve seen three generations of families grow up with us at our restaurant.”

Her mother and father, Helen and Hua Te Su, originally opened Shanghai Garden two blocks away, moving to a more spacious location in 1992. Chef Hua had begun cooking at the age of 12 and took care to emphasize healthful ingredients at the restaurant. The couple opened a second location in Issaquah in 1996, which ran for a decade.

During that time, on Mother’s Day weekend of 2005, the family lost Helen to cancer. The four children, Christine, Kathy Su-Tsow, Betty and Dan, then took over the family business. Starting during the pandemic, Christine and Kathy have run the restaurant together.

When that longtime chef retired, another came out of retirement to help: their father, Hua Te.

“With him coming back, a lot of customers are like, ‘Oh my gosh, the food is really amazing,’” Su says. “I think people could tell the master chef was back in the kitchen.” He’ll be there through Shanghai Garden’s last day on May 31.

“He actually helped make the decision” to close down, Su says. “He said, ‘You know, we’ve had a good run.’”