A Night At The Bonaventure

Since the early 2000s, perhaps the premiere venues for Chinese banquets, particularly wedding banquets have been two Hilton hotels, the Universal City Hilton and the San Gabriel Hilton. The San Gabriel Hilton as a Chinese banquet site is logical given its location in the San Gabriel Valley.  The Universal City Hilton is less intuitive but can be traced to the ownership of the hotel by Taiwanese interests, plus a history of Chinese wedding and other banquets dating back to the 1980s at the fancy Fung Lum Restaurant in Universal City.  

Of course, if you are going to host Chinese banquets on a regular basis, it makes sense to have a Chinese kitchen in-house.  And if you have a Chinese kitchen, it's probably also a good idea to have to have a regularly operating Chinese restaurant in the hotel, which both the Universal City Hilton (Cafe Sierra) and the San Gabriel Hilton (Trinity Restaurant) have on premises.  So it is against this backdrop that I encountered the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a Chinese banquet venue.

I first learned of the Bonaventure's Chinese banquet facilities five years ago when I was invited to the annual dinner of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers' Association, at which there was a nice quality Chinese banquet.  I had wondered whether the banquet had been produced in-house or via an outside provider, but got nowhere with my inquiry.   So when I was invited to this year's SCCLA banquet at the same venue, I decided to dig a little bit deeper.  This time I found a one line blurb on the hotel’s wedding facilities website that says a traditional Chinese banquet is available.  Interestingly the website also noted to capability for Kosher, Indian and Persian wedding banquets, with the qualification that these are outside catered, giving the implication that Chinese banquets were prepared in-house.

Consequently, I was looking forward to a nice meal comparable to that at the 2017 SCCLA banquet.   We arrived late, so there were just scraps left from the appetizer plate.  Then came the beef with vegetables, which was a tasty dish.

 

However, things quickly went south.  The honey walnut shrimp was gruesome.

Here's the Chinese fried chicken with shrimp chips.  It would seem impossible to wreck shrimp chips, but these were soggy and bland.

The vegetable plate was a delicious as it looks.

And the grand prize went to the salt and pepper fish, which was like eating cardboard.

 

At this point I stopped taking pictures.  This was an absolutely laughable, terrible Chinese banquet.  My son did clear one thing up.  He spoke with a Chinese bartender who has worked Bonaventure Chinese banquets for many years and confirmed that the food is catered externally. (I do remember in the 1990s that the Bonaventure was Taiwanese owned at the time, and there was a nice Chinese restaurant there called Mandarin Cove, which was succeeded by Mandarin West, so there was once a Chinese kitchen in the hotel, which would explain the continuing banquets.)   But if one wondered how a Chinese kitchen could turn out such an awful meal, the answer is that it didn't.  Of course, now the question is how a professional caterer could put together a disaster like this.  And in any event, the Chinese banquet availability at the Bonaventure has been the best kept secret in town, and clearly needs to stay that way.