Raising the Roof
Local restaurateurs prepare for new location's opening

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

Construction workers watch Tuesday as a crane lifts the roof into place at the new King Dragon restaurant building at the corner of U.S. 491 and Jefferson Avenue in Gallup. The new location will include a larger dining room and a night club. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

GALLUP — As Joann and Mike Hsu start preparing to move into the new and improved King Dragon, they realize that their workload will increase.

Not only will the new restaurant which will be located just north of the present facility on U.S. Highway 491 be more than twice the size of the present facility, but it will also include a lounge.

But no matter how much extra work there will be, it will not compared to the time just 13 years ago when they first opened the doors of the restaurant, which almost immediately became one of the more popular eating places in town.

The restaurant was a project of the family that ran Chinese restaurants in Farmington, and that's where the Hsu family lived when the Gallup restaurant opened.

So for five months, as Joann searched for a home she and Mike could purchase, both Joann and Mike traveled daily to and from Farmington, starting the trek back at about midnight seven days a week and getting back to Gallup by 8 a.m. the following day to begin preparing the food.

Both remember getting little sleep during that period as they struggled to make sure that the food was equal to the quality that the family prepared in Farmington. Mike Hsu also remembers the speeding tickets and the joy both he and Joann felt when they finally settled down to a home in Gallup although it was a mobile home.

Today, King Dragon has almost become an institution in Gallup, attracting a wide segment of the local and reservation population that dotes on Chinese food. Its popularity can seen by the fact that Gallup is home to almost as many restaurants specializing in Chinese food as Mexican food.

As the new building nears completion the opening date is now expected to be in July more and more customers, said Joann Hsu, are asking why go through the expense of building your whole facility.

But Mike Hsu said it's always been his dream from the days he started working at the family business in Farmington after he and Joann moved here from Taiwan to have a first class Chinese restaurant in a building that he owned. (The present site is leased.)

Thanks to the support of his customers, that dream can now become a reality.

The new restaurant will require the employee level to go from the present 30 to almost 50, and it will be different in some ways from the present one, he said.

First off, while the restaurant will continue to provide the Chinese buffet that the current one does, families will be able to order from the menu a number of new items, including steak and lobster and king crab.

He said he also plans to have a barbecue grill.

There's also talk of a sushi bar, but Joann Hsu said this will be entered into very cautiously to see just how much customers in this area like the idea of eating raw fish.

While some customers have already expressed an interest, Mike Hsu said providing sushi is impossible unless there is a market since the fish have to be very fresh flown in daily and then sold within 24 hours to maintain the quality and to be edible.

If it doesn't sell within a certain time frame measured in hours it has to be thrown away, and that becomes very expensive.

Joann Hsu said the idea is to try it out on certain days to see if there is a demand before even thinking about making it a regular item on the menu.

The Chinese New Year celebrations which occur around January or February will continue, mainly because they continue to grow in popularity.

First celebrated in their second year in business with a little more than 200 coming in for the buffet which was expanded to include such things as king crab, this past celebration drew more than 600.

Yes, the buffet is expensive $30 a person but Mike Hsu said that with the extra foods that are provided in the buffet (some 1,000 pounds of king crab were prepared this year) and the freebies ($1.00 is returned for good luck and everyone gets a souvenir coffee mug), the restaurant basically breaks even.

The facts that it doesn't make any money and it takes a whole week to prepare all of the food that is served may be why the other restaurants in the family business (in Farmington and Flagstaff) haven't picked up on the idea.

"We do it more to show appreciation to our customers," Mike Hsu said, adding that it also works to promote the restaurant and get people to come back the rest of the year.

This is the same attitude that the Hsu family is bring to the new building.

"We want the building to be nice so people will like coming there," Mike Hsu said.

The family is investing more than $2 million on the new venture but both Joann and Mike Hsu are optimistic that with hard work and an emphasis on quality food and customer satisfaction, Gallup and reservation families will embrace this new restaurant as they did the original.