A blast from the past is this pair of sheephead from Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park.
In the late 1980s and 1990s we in Los Angeles gorged ourselves on steamed sheephead. California sheephead was a junk fish that sold for 10 cents a pound. But in the 1980s the Chinese seafood restaurant craze crossed over from Hong Kong to the US and Canada, and California Chinese chefs discovered that sheephead, considered by locals as ugly tasting, was a superior variety of fish when steamed live, Cantonese style.
However after more than a decade of glorious dining, this unwanted junk fish turned into an overfished endangered species later in the 1990s with limitations placed on catch size. Furthermore, sheephead are hermaphroditic, fish that turn from female to male as needed to balance the population. However, with the larger, male fish being caught for consumption, the new converted males are smaller, and less attractive for dining.
Consequently, sheephead pretty much disappeared from Chinese restaurant menus in California for quite a while. They’re back on the menu in some restaurants but aren’t the attraction they used to be, perhaps because two smaller fish don’t have the punch you get from one bigger one.
Of
course, as you may have heard, Elite Restaurant had a serious kitchen
fire a couple of weeks ago. When I posted that event on Instagram,
there were snarky remarks such as "insurance time!" and comments on how
bad business has been recently at Elite. Sadly any time a Chinese
restaurant burns, everybody's initial reaction is to wonder whether the
fire was deliberately set to save a fading business through fire
insurance proceeds. And clearly there have been enough of true examples
of this happening in the past to justify considering these events
automatically suspicious.
On our last visit to Elite, the dining room was totally empty on a Thursday night, though two private rooms were occupied. However this is not necessarily alarming because this reflects a trend going back more than five years where your larger dim sum/Hong Kong style seafood restaurants do an excellent business for dim sum, but pare back at dinner time, even on weekends. For example I’m not sure whether there was even a waiter on duty at Elite when we were there, or whether the manager doubled as waiter, as in the private room the manager brought in the dishes.
It is hard to figure out why these dim sum palace type restaurants do such a massive business at lunch but are so quiet at night. Most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that the next generation Chinese Americans, known as the “626 Generation “ in the San Gabriel Valley are all into dim sum, but would rather go someplace else for dinner that is more casual, more economical, more trendy, or perhaps not even Chinese. Thus dinner time at these restaurants is left to the old folks like us. Furthermore a similar pattern extends beyond the San Gabriel Valley, as informants have indicated that that the bustling dim sum lunch/sparse dinner crowd phenomenon is also present in Chinese communities across the country.
In
the case of Elite, I would be surprised if this wasn't just a kitchen
accident. With Chinese restaurant food being prepared at such high
temperatures, and with all the grease and oil flying around, the chances
of a kitchen fire in a Chinese restaurant are much higher than other
types of restaurants. Meanwhile empty dining rooms at night are
currently a fact of life with sit down Hong Kong dim sum and seafood
restaurants and are part of the equation in operating such a business.
Shortly before the fire, Elite had been named to the Los Angeles Times
prestigious listing of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, which
was sure to bring them an influx in business. And finally, insurance
companies are well aware of the checkered history of Chinese restaurant
fires, and nobody is going to get an insurance payout unless the facts
clearly support an accidental event.
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