We visited the iconic restaurant before it closed its doors last weekend.

by Nathalie Graham

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.

The Stranger