Jay Eats Worldwide

End of a Dim Sum Era! Remembering Empress Pavilion One of the icons of Chinatown in Los Angeles closed for good in early June 2013. It was a large Hong Kong-style restaurant that opened in 1989. It was a good 24+ year run! I had heard some comments in the industry that they were having issues, but my first thought was come on...I guess it was true. According to the Los Angeles Times , they were evicted, the restaurant owners fell behind on rent. I remember when this center opened, filled with  all kinds of shops and a market on the ground floor. Today when I visited, the market has been gone for many years now, the escalators are out of order, most of the stores are empty, the building needs repair work, and there was no way I was getting into  the elevators... It's sad to see the condition that this center is in, but the saddest part is the 100+ employees of Empress Pavilion now out of work,  some of t...

Besides food service consulting, I work with corporations on marketing, product development, packaging, promotions, PR, and lately social media. I'm finding out that a lot of companies don't participate in the community that they conduct business in. How do they expect to be part of the community? The ones that I do talk to, think it has to do with having a booth at the local festival. Yes, that could be one way, but it could be as simple as using their parking lot on a Saturday to wash cars to raise money for new team uniforms or passing out advertisements for community sponsored event. A few years ago, a neighborhood grocer was killed in a robbery. The neighbors placed so many candles and flowers in front of the store, the family couldn't believe it. Neighbors were saying that this man would help out his customers if they fell a few cents short, needed milk for the kids before payday, or even hired locals to do odd jobs around the store. This man participated in t...

It’s always sad when I see a business close because the owners had no idea of how to run their business. In the restaurant business, everyone thinks it’s the food. I’ve seen places that the health department has closed because of lack of permits or food handling experience. Just because you like to cook and serve people, doesn’t mean that you’ll make a good restaurant owner. An acquaintance of mine had a restaurant that he couldn’t run and did a lot of things wrong, though he’s had many years of restaurant experience. In my opinion, he hired the wrong people to manage the front and he oversaw the kitchen & food quality. He spent more time handling all of the restaurant problems and didn’t have time to take care of the food. The kitchen operations went down hill fast, now customers were complaining about the food quality. The managers that he hired didn’t have the experience to handle the front end problems. He recently closed his restaurant and let his staff go. Looking bac...