China Harbor has sat on the western edge of Lake Union for 30 years—a hulking black box surrounded by docked yachts and boat rental companies.
But until last week, I’d never been inside the massive Chinese restaurant. Every time I drove past, the big red letters in the stereotypical typeface literally called “wonton font” shouted “CHINA HARBOR,” drawing my attention to the building and the steps leading up through the round entryway. I would try to glimpse what and who was in there until the curves in the road pulled my eyes away.
For the three decades it’s occupied the former Elks Lodge building along Westlake Avenue, China Harbor has been mired in conspiracy. It’s been a mythmaker, an object of fascination. Anyone I asked about the restaurant spoke about it conspiratorially. “It’s a front, you know,” they’d say. “It’s always empty there. The Chinese mafia owns it.” They spoke of bad food, of poor health ratings, and rampant rat infestations. They’d toss around theories about prostitution, drugs, and basement gambling. None of them—friends, coworkers, strangers on the internet—had ever been. The mystery grew. Then, less than a month ago, the restaurant’s team posted on Facebook that China Harbor would be closing. Finally, during its last week in operation, I ate at China Harbor.
I arrived with two friends at 6:30 pm and waited in a long, unmoving line to just talk to the hostess. Inside the banquet hall, which I could only glimpse from my spot in the empty lobby, people dined. Behind me, the line kept growing as more and more people showed up to pay their respects, or whet the appetites of their curiosities before it was too late. Many seemed surprised to find a line, to have to wait. They’d probably bought into the “mafia front” rumors, too, and had expected an empty ballroom.
In the large dining room, a wall of windows snaked around the perimeter, framing the view of South Lake Union and the Seattle skyline with ornate red lattice. The room’s light glowed through painted ceiling tiles in between wood-carved beams. Tables and tables filled with people filled a dining space as big as a football field.
The hostess sat my group at a table next to the window that looked out at the lake as dusk fell on Seattle. A frazzled waiter, his disposable mask slipping beneath his nose, took our order, advising us to order all at once because “it would take a long time.” We could barely hear him above the din of diners and only ordered appetizers.
The crab rangoons came first and were gone in a matter of seconds and a matter of bites. My stomach growled gratefully when the moo shu pork came out. I wasted no time slopping hoisin sauce onto a pancake as I piled pork in the middle. I moaned as I took a bite. Yum. We heaped steamed garlic green beans onto our plates and consulted the menu for our main dishes.
In the frenzy of closing-time festivities, we couldn’t flag down a waiter. When a busboy came to clear our dirty appetizer dishes, we begged him for a drink menu.
“Oh, I don’t know what we have,” he said. “I’ll go get someone. Today’s my first day.” The restaurant’s planned closure was in three days.
Soon, a waitress came. She took our orders. When we asked for beef chow mein, she said, “No. Get chung fu. It’s better.” We trusted her. When we ordered dim sum, she shook her head. “None left.”
We gorged on almond chicken and slurped beef chung fu. By the time the beef and broccoli came out, we determined it would make a good lunch tomorrow and split it into to-go boxes. All of us left China Harbor sated and impressed.
Above all, it seemed like a normal Chinese restaurant. Where did all the hullabaloo come from?
After eating there, I wanted to dive into the mystery surrounding the building. And, boy, would you believe it? That mystery that’s tailed the business for decades? It’s actually just run-of-the-mill racism.
If you want to know anything about what White Seattle thought about China Harbor through the decades, look no further than the Naked Loon, an early-aughts satire blog that now reads like The Needling’s conservative, unfunny uncle. A farcical story from the Naked Loon called “China Harbor Probably Not Just A Restaurant” involves, what I assume, is a made up story of the Loon staking out the building:
Most people agree that the 34 thousand square foot facility is in fact a front for a massive drug smuggling operation. The establishment’s waterfront location and immense storage space make this pretty much a foregone conclusion. In an attempt to confirm this, our investigators called the restaurant, and attempted to make a reservation for “Cocaine, party of 2 kilos” in a fake Chinese accent. The outburst of mixed Chinese and English profanity that resulted from this query was considered to be proof enough of the assertion, and we felt that it had been worth the trouble making the previous thirty calls in which the person answering had merely hung up on us without responding.
Although China Harbor does technically meet the qualifications for being considered a restaurant—in that they serve things purporting to be food—the food that is served is unnaturally shiny and, according to a lab we sent it to, may in fact be plastic.
The Loon piece goes on, but it hits on a few key China Harbor myths: The restaurant cannot possibly afford all of that space by just being a restaurant, illegal things must be funding this desirable piece of real-estate, and the food is dirty.
Maybe The Loon is an artifact from a bygone era where punching down with stereotypical racist jokes could win you a Comedy Central special, but 2008 wasn’t that long ago, and this racism still exists, evidenced by all the still-persistent China Harbor rumors.
It doesn’t take a genius to piece together that all of these incredibly racist things are common in anti-Asian rhetoric, but I’ll lay it out for you.
According to a PBS story published in the wake of the pandemic during the height of anti-Asian hate, “persistent false narratives… that Chinese American neighborhoods or Chinatowns are dens of vice send the message that Asian people are less civilized.” Suggesting that China Harbor houses a brothel upstairs or a gambling den in the basement isn’t only racist, it’s unoriginal! Theories that Asian businesses aren’t legitimate businesses, but fronts for illegal activity are commonplace nationally. And so is the whole dirty food thing.
Assuming Asian food is “dirty or disease-laden” is a trope we can trace back to the 1850s when white people spread the false rumor that Chinese immigrants ate rat and dog meat. In reality, those lies—which should sound very familiar to us right now—were how white people expressed their fear of the new, the unknown. For white workers in the 1850s, this sneering at Chinese immigrants was white workers using them “as a scapegoat for their economic woes,” Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University told PBS. This has another name: xenophobia.
Think about monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The chemical compound, founded in the early 1900s as a way to enhance the umami flavor in food, was maligned starting in the late 1960s when a doctor blamed the seasoning for the bad feeling he got after eating Chinese food. This spawned an entire ailment known literally as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Despite there being no actual proof that MSG was harmful, the stuff all but disappeared in Chinese food in the US.
“That MSG causes health problems may have thrived on racially charged biases from the outset,” an article in Five Thirty Eight explained. This “fear of MSG in Chinese food” was just another example of “the U.S.’s long history of viewing the ‘exotic’ cuisine of Asia as dangerous or dirty.”
In reality, chances are the China Harbor was making ends meet not by trafficking drugs from one side of Lake Union to the other or whatever people assume, but by being a unique, multi-use space in this otherwise commercial part of town. Their event space was hugely popular in Seattle’s Asian community. In their closing announcement, they wrote that, on their busiest days, they “served over 500 guests.” On weekends, the restaurant’s event space gets booked out for salsa nights and other multicultural dance spaces. There’s a massage business and a basement swimming pool where people take swim lessons. It’s a hub for non-white Seattle. Does any place that doesn’t cater specifically to white Seattleites always inspire this kind of fear or suspicion?
I regret not having given China Harbor a chance before it closed its doors due to staffing woes, high rents, and construction fees. While the China Harbor rumors always seemed far-fetched to me, I felt guilty for even entertaining them without ever having gone inside the building; For entering the restaurant and looking for any sign mob activity. I wonder if anyone else who packed that dining room to get a glimpse of a Seattle mystery realized the conspiracy part of the popular conspiracy theories as they cleaned China Harbor out of dim sum. I wish I got to eat some dim sum. The next time that craving comes I’ll go to the restaurant’s new venture, Vivienne’s Bistro.
Great article Nathalie – with a punch!
Sorry I never dined there.
Besides reading like 50 Shades of Gray written by Guy Fieri, this article could’ve gone to the trouble of looking at the history of safety violations at China Harbor: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/food-safety/search-restaurant-safety-ratings#/details/PR0010269
Great reminder that dismissal of Asian American concerns in the great conversation about race — because “white adjacent” — is very problematic. Some people wouldn’t get nuance if it hit them on the head.
A blonde friend of mine used to go dancing at China Harbor regularly. She never, ever claimed to have dined there, it was all about dancing, drinks, and the view. It was also a good place to go for a nightcap, after disembarking from an evening’s inter-lake sightseeing cruise. I’m sorry to read it is gone, but that’s just modern Seattle.
@2: Name just one restaurant without violations. Just for fun, I found a number of violations from your link for Canlis!
this Column is Totes
usurprising, given
their well-known
Proclivities to-
ward Inscrut-
Ability.*
@5
ah
Yes
bit it’s
a Much
Better Class
of ‘violations’
and
Who knows
What race that
‘health inspector’
Identifies as or with
*you merely
had to visit
I remember going there a few times in the 90’s (?), but it wasn’t exactly on the beaten path. There was also a nice place called Franco’s Hidden Harbor, not far from there. I don’t know when it diappeared.
Let’s bring back the Elk’s Club and all join. Wouldn’t that be jolly?
Former China Harbor bartender here. There were rats and roaches all over the place. It’s hardly racist to point this out.
Crab Rangoon? Almond chicken? Beef Chow Mein? No chop suey and fortune cookies?
During my starving artist days (music [drums], freelance combat reporting [Afghanistan]) I tended bar at China Harbor to supplement my main part-time day job at the Stranger (Twenty-five years of service!).
China Harbor was not a mafia front. But the owner, Mr. Sun, was pretty ruthless. (He wasn’t directly involved in the management of China Harbor in recent years, renting it out to another restauranteur.) He imported much of his kitchen staff from mainland China. He warehoused them in rooms above the upper floor banquet hall. Upon their arrival he would confiscate their passports (illegal, but the Chinese nationals didn’t know this). More than once, a cook, tired of the abuse, would break into tears, begging for their passport so he could return to China. They were refused (illegal, but the Chinese nationals didn’t know this). He didn’t treat the bar staff like this because, Americans, we would have quit.
Most of CH’s income was from Chinese wedding banquets. A $100/table fee was charged as a tip for the servers. They never got (all, or any) of it. At the end of each night, Mr. Sun would chew out each server, one-by-one, telling them why he was keeping half, or all, of it for himself.
The kitchen closed at 10 PM. If a bartender needed to get something from the kitchen freezer later at night, as soon as the lights were flicked on…roaches galore. Sometimes customers at the bar would complain of a stench, like a dead animal. One time, during a customer-less day shift, morbid curiosity and boredom got the best of me, and I swept my arm beneath one of the bar fridges to see what would be unearthed. Two rats, desiccated, flat as pancakes.
None of this is anti-Asian racism, Nathalie. It’s the Harbor. BTW, I always loved the garlic green beans. Good choice.
And I will say this about the Harbor: It was the most multi-cultural place I have ever experienced! On many nights, there would be a Chinese wedding reception on the main floor, Salsa Night at the bar, Hip-Hop night upstairs, and the Yacht Club downstairs. A true melting pot with no assistance from DEI experts.
I don’t miss the day job part of my previous starving artist life. But I’m feeling just a little bit of nostalgia here, RIP China Harbor.
“Let’s
bring back the
Elk’s Club and all join. “
any ‘club’ that’d have Me
innit I want No
Business
with.
pass.
kristofarian dear, when I was young the Elk’s Club in my hometown seemed so glamorous. It was the former lobby and dining room of the Chieftain Hotel, which had been converted to apartments for senior citizens. The Elk’s portion was very 1920’s faded glam, with Palladian windows and a huge chandelier in the main area (the former lobby). The marble front desk had been converted to a bar. So chi-chi for a town like that.
Over in Eastern Washington, we could join either the Moose or Eagles. I want to, but haven’t made up my mind which one. The Moose seems a little more with it and doesn’t require that you be religious, but there are more Eagle lodges in the PNW, including in Seattle, which I believe is Moose-less. (fun fact: The fraternal order of Eagles began in Seattle by a bunch of theatre people)
China harbor was my favorite Chinese restaurant. Great food, wonderful service , and the best views in Seattle… especially during duck dodge Tuesdays. The order by the letters were our staple, but I sure did like the almond shrimp and my wife and kids loved their vegetable dishes. They really knew how to cook vegetables that tasted just right, yummy. My family and I will definitely miss it.
Can’t believe you drove there Natalie! Biking along the waterfront trail is definitely the way to go, it’s a great ride for kids. Or on the 40 bus. Get your damn car out of there.
Years earlier I remember dancing at the attached bar. That was so much fun too. There were so many regulars who would come and dance each week. I’m so sad to see that go.
Kudos for running a great restaurant for so many years 😃
@2,
I thought it read perfectly fine. Admittedly though, I’ve not read 50 Shades of Gray, nor anything written by Guy Fieri and so will have to defer to your expertise there.
Just guessing :
A half-hour later, you were hungry again.
What do I win?
@Catalina
‘The fraternal order of Eagles
began in Seattle by a
bunch of theatre
people’
ah, Yes!
Those types!
we get along fine
the Eagles
having pool tables
the ‘choice’ for me is automatic
and Yeah
I ‘Believe in’
a ‘Higher Power’:
didn’t
Gawd make
Magic fucking Mushrooms?
I feel like I’ve read this story before, maybe even years ago. Furthermore, I am almost certain that I’ve read #10’s submission as well. Is it some sort of deja vu, am I perhaps imagining, or is The Stranger re-purposing old material?
@17: No, it’s a new story. There was a short article about China Harbor when they first announced they were closing.
The current owners, who took over one year before the pandemic begin, reported that they were closing due to labor shortages and inflation pricing. Sometimes a business just closes, but The Stranger needs a boogeyman.
If the place was just a front for drug dealing, wouldn’t that have been enough to keep it IN business? And quite frankly, you’d really have to wonder why that creepy, stalkery right wing “satire” magazine would have been that obsessed with smearing the place. What did China Harbor ever do to THEM?
I’m sorry, but this is just absurd. I will shamelessly maintain that “China Harbor” was a sketchy ass place. For those keeping score:
it was A CATHEDRAL sized restaurant that was dirt cheap and always empty. I dare anyone to produce a picture of this place at lunch with more people than tables.
if you ate there (which i did, and not on closing day) you got terrible service, mediocre food, in a dimly lit room surrounded by dozens of empty tables that felt like the set of “Titanic” with no extras. Why was i there? It was dirt cheap.
there was a goddamn massage parlor… because those are never sketchy… pro sex work or not, I would expect the stranger to understand that there’s a correlation…..
the rumors about the rats and bugs aren’t exactly dispelled by the “ok” rating from the county health inspectors…
in the article about the totally normal restaurant you mentioned the bus boy who was employed there for 3 days… almost like they didn’t actually have wait staff to match their cavernous size so they hired up for it…. As one does?
it was about a dozen different businesses at once, all of which didn’t exactly make sense for the location
it was definitely a gorgeous venue for a wedding. It had a lovely view. Which is why it’s McDonald’s prices were weird….
In trying to “fact check” the claims all “The Stranger” seems to have done is eaten Chinese food on closing day after talking to a Bus Boy… who was just hired less than a week before. I’m glad you liked your meal. I’m sad the Salsa dance venue, swimming pool, Chinese restaurant, waterfront massage parlor didn’t work out as a business. It was such a straightforward business plan…
@10 – I had a brief stint bartending at China Harbor around 2003/2004 and can confirm everything you’ve said. Tips stolen from bartenders at the end of the night was regular, usually as a ruse of claiming the bartender’s till didn’t match receipts and making them pay up, often paying out of pocket above the tips (it was a rotating scam we all knew was coming). Tips were fairly meager to begin with – also the tip jars were big wide mouth vases that anyone could grab a handful out of without being noticed amongst the madness. Also just not paying us for things like staying till after 3:00am picking lollipops out of the carpet of the banquet hall following a halloween party. We certainly caught some mafia vibes, but ultimately a corrupt owner is the simplest explanation.
It was wild to be serving a packed house for salsa dancing while a KUBE 93 party went on upstairs.
I ate frequently at China Harbor and also went to salsa nights. I’m sorry that its closed as it will leave a huge gap in Seattle almost non existent night life. But this article smacks of exactly the kind of racism that it accuses others of. I doubt that even one in 20,000 seattlites are familiar with the Loon or the racism they expoused. I’ve also never seen a review in the Stranger for the food at China Harbor. Why was that? Did the uber progressive reviewers think that places that people of color frequent were not worthy of reviews. The ‘journalist’s’ off handed remark that they wished they had gone there even once before their closing dinner smacks of the uber liberal elite, similar to ‘Oh another 100 people of drug overdoses – how sad – maybe we should said something before it happened. Oh well sh*t happens. I did not expect that from the Stranger but then I am starting to think that most of the articles are now being written by a free and sub-standard version of ChatGPT.
China Harbor had a really big hall that they would rent out. I’m sure this was responsible for a lot of their money. This got hit especially hard with the pandemic. They also had issues with the building. I don’t think the food was very good until recently, although the view was great.
I spent one summer working at a Seattle waterfront restaurant. Health code violations, vermin and shady practices by management (and bartenders) were common. Most of us were white so it didn’t stick.
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/china-harbor-will-return-with-new-name-and-new-owner/
No mention of racism, except in the eyes of The Stanker.