At the East End of the Bridge, Part 1: China Cafe

270 (109) Soquel Avenue

At the corner of Riverside and Soquel you now find an office building usually occupied by lawyers, the parking lot of the Hind Quarter, Riverside Lighting, and Maharaja, an Indian restaurant.  One hundred years ago, where that restaurant is, there was a general store, the lighting store was a mansion, and across the street was the tree-lined Branciforte Creek and no parking lot.

Royal Taj and Maharaja

Many Santa Cruzans remember the China Cafe where the Maharaja is now. Even if you didn’t know, the swooping eaves reveal its past life as a Chinese Restaurant.

Like many who loved the China Cafe and its family-owned atmosphere, I was sad when it closed and converted to an Indian Restaurant, Royal Taj, which is a chain from San Jose. But there was something I liked about it. When the Royal Taj first opened, the waiters and cooks lived somewhere south of my house on Riverside avenue. Every morning, six or seven men walked to work together up Riverside, and late every night they walked home. Here passing my front door was the immigrants’ experience: men living together with other men in the worst neighborhood in town, working together at the same establishment. I assume they immigrated together from the same place, somewhere far away. How many times has this been how Santa Cruzans arrived here? 1840s? 1880s? 1920s? 1950s? Over and over people come to Santa Cruz poor and hard-working and enjoy the weather.

China Cafe

I thought China Cafe would always be there, and now it’s been gone for over twenty years.

In the 1980s, I lived in a studio apartment in a Victorian up Soquel.  A hungry graduate student, I could get a plate of six pot stickers for $3. Lunch was $2.95 and dinner $4.50. I never tired of it because the titrated mixture of hot oil to soy sauce added infinite variety. Pedestrians passing the windows as they crossed the bridge offered endless entertainment. I came in so often that year, I kept up with the waitress’s pregnancy. Jackie was married to the founder’s son, Wing Soo Hoo. I remember her father-in-law was still cooking: Deck Soo Hoo.

Origins on Pacific

Deck Soo Hoo opened the China Cafe with his brother Gim in 1944 on 280  (now 1007) Pacific avenue where Union Grove is now, next to the Catalyst. It was next door to the Santa Cruz Bowl back then, and was probably a popular place to get a good meal before or after bowling.

China Cafe Opens Saturday

The long awaited and much desired Chinese Restaurant will become a reality when the new China Cafe at 280 Pacific avenue is opened Saturday, Aug 12 at 4 pm by Gim Soo Hoo, well known chef about town.

The cafe, which is in the location once occupied by the American restaurant, has undergone a complete transformation in the last few weeks. Being large, the restaurant has both booths and a counter to accommodate its patrons. Along the walls are scene paintings of beauty spots in the western states, covering mountains, lakes, and coastal scenes. The tinted walls as well as the paints are in warm creams and tans, while the linoleum floors are of a marble pattern in the same hues.

The kitchen, too, has been renovated in preparation for the two Chinese cooks who will rule supreme while concocting dishes such as chop suey, chow mein, and many other mysterious delicacies, as well as the popular Chinese noodles. Aside from the oriental food, however, steaks and short orders will be found among the items on the menu.

It is good to know the decor of a good Chinese restaurant never changed.

China Cafe announced a remodel in 1961 and removed the counter, but it looks like they kept the paintings of Western beauty spots.

Santa Cruz Sentinel, Fri, May 12, 1961, Page 10

Merchants on the south end of Pacific avenue have tried for decades to drum up the same prosperity as the north end, and in the 60s the problem was no different, the ambience made even worse as the most prominent businesses were car dealerships and mechanics. A 1963 example of the typical boosterism, where a Sentinel article “Around the World in a Block and a Half” included the China Cafe along with a Tea House in the Trade Winds import store on one side of the China Cafe,  Anna’s Diner (Hungarian etc), on the other next door side, and Mexican at Tampico Kitchen at 822 Pacific across the street. Mexican food was still a novelty.  

The flood of 1955 damaged the building on Pacific, and in 1963 Deck Soo Hoo took out a permit to build the new restaurant at 270 Soquel, making it the one of two purpose-built Chinese restaurants in town. (Yan Flower—Cathay Cafe—is the other.) The lot at the end of the bridge became available after the flood-damaged buildings there were removed as part of the levee work in 1957. (More on those buildings in the next post.)

The China Cafe promised Cantonese and Peking Style cooking in 1977, and added Szechuan in 1984. In the last advertisement in the Sentinel 50 years after the first one in 1944, the restaurant was still promising the very latest fad in Chinese food, this time the secret menu.

Last Sentinel advertisement for China Cafe, May 30, 1996

How is it that such a well-traveled corner in an old part of town came to be available for building? It turns out that the same floods that pushed China Cafe off Pacific avenue wiped out an established commercial corner at the east end of the Bridge: the Riverside Cash Store.

At the East End of the Bridge, Part 2: The Riverside Cash Store

A version of this post with citations.