The Chinese in Toronto from 1878. Arlene Chan
service. The truck for Hoy Jack Laundry, located at 95 Harbord Street, is parked in Chinatown in 1923.
One goods store offered a variety of provisions, including Chinese herbs, homemade Chinese sausage, and various other imported products from China. It operated not only from the storefront but also from a truck, delivering to restaurants and laundries. The owner’s son remembered how deliveries were made to the customers:
The business card of Y.S. Chu, who owned the export and import store the Oriental Trading Company, lists the inventory, including “coolie coats.”
My dad would go out two or three times a week on a circuit. He had to deliver because a bag of rice was 45 pounds, a barrel of soap was 120 pounds, a barrel of starch was 120 pounds, and a bag of soda, 100 pounds. You couldn’t take that on the streetcar very well.68
TABLE 6
Chinese Population and Businesses in Toronto, 1881 to 1931
Source: Valerie Mah, An In-Depth Look at Toronto’s Early Chinatown, 1913-1933 (masters thesis, University of Toronto, 1977).
Restaurants and Cafés
A second occupational niche that appeared in great numbers was the business of restaurants, cafés, and hamburger joints (see Table 6). Downtown Toronto was a popular spot to open eating establishments for office workers, store clerks, labourers, and travellers, who were hungry for reasonably priced food. These establishments were started for similar reasons as laundries, as Chinese could borrow startup money and learn the business on-the-job, but partnerships.
were the only way that low-paid Chinese with limited savings could start their small businesses.
Although the initial capital investment of $1,000 to $2,000 for restaurants was two to three times greater than for laundries, the margin of profit was greater. Using the premises for working and sleeping kept costs to a minimum for more profitability. And they hired from within the family. One immigrant, who arrived as a 21-year-old in 1912, worked at a number of Chinese restaurants where he was consistently replaced by a family member:
During those years most Chinese employers only hired their relatives or people who had the same surname. Even if you were hired by an employer to whom you were not related, as soon as he found a relative to take your place, you would immediately be fired. Thus, over the years, I moved around to many towns and cities.69
Sing Tom’s Restaurant was Toronto’s first Chinese restaurant to open in 1901. It was located at 37½ Queen Street West, later the site of the Robert Simpson Company.70 The name changed to Sing Wing Restaurant in 1902, but within the next year, the address was occupied by Kong Yee Teas.71 As more restaurants opened, so did fears that these and other Chinese businesses would hire white women and corrupt them with opium or sell them into white slavery.
In 1908 Toronto’s city solicitor advised the Board of Police Commissioners to refuse licenses to Chinese restaurants that employed white women. Chinese restaurant owners in Toronto protested that their businesses would suffer, and the policy was largely ignored by the police.72 Even when provincial legislation was enacted in 1914 to prohibit the employment of white women by Chinese, it was not strictly enforced. In 1923 there were 126 white women employed in 121 Chinese restaurants in Toronto.73
A tremendous expansion of restaurants occurred between 1917 and 1923, with an increase of 900 percent from 32 to 202 establishments.74 The restaurants in Chinatown served mostly Chinese food. Two restaurants, Hung Fah Low and Jung Wah, gained some notoriety at 12½ Elizabeth Street. The clientele were mostly Chinese and the few non-Chinese were predominantly Jewish, there to enjoy Chinese food. Vaudeville actors, who performed nearby at the Shea’s Hippodrome Theatre on Bay Street or the Casino Theatre on Queen Street, were known to frequent the restaurants in Chinatown. Actor Edward G. Robinson, whose stage career peaked in the 1920s and subsequent screen career culminated in over 100 films, claimed that “12½ [Elizabeth Street] was the best place to eat.”75
Not all visitors to Chinese restaurants were welcomed customers, however. In 1919 the Toronto Star reported a major disturbance when a mob of 400 men raided Hop War Low’s café at 31 Elizabeth Street, stole $300, and then proceeded to smash the store windows of neighbouring Chinese businesses, including Louis Ling’s barber shop at 11 Elizabeth Street, Kwong Chun’s store at 6 Elizabeth Street, and Wing Ching Tank’s grocery store at 8 Elizabeth Street. The incident was allegedly caused by a remark made by the waiter as he refused to serve some soldiers the previous evening. Toronto Mayor. Thomas Church strongly condemned these actions and quickly restored order.89
A Chinese restaurant at 31 Elizabeth Street made the news when it served a sumptuous banquet, featuring an eight-course menu with birds’ nest soup, sturgeon’s fins, whole breaded chicken, fish rolls Manchu-style, lichee duck, chicken with mushrooms, and grilled squab. Dr. McCulloch and his wife were the hosts for the guest of honour, Dr. C.H. Yen, who was in Toronto from Beijing for post-graduate work. Another dinner guest was Bishop William White, whose work as a missionary in China for 38 years established 11 Anglican churches. During his mission there, he amassed a collection of Chinese cultural and art objects that he donated to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library. At age 60, he became the first curator of the museum’s Chinese collection and the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Toronto.
Outside of Chinatown, Chinese mostly operated small cafés and hamburger joints, typically furnished with booths and counters. These catered to Canadian — not Chinese — customers and served Western food, like roast beef, steaks, apple pie, and ice cream. Lithuanian men were known to pick up box lunches from Chinese lunch grills during the week, on their way from boarding-houses to factories in the east end of the city.76 The main attraction was the price, which was much more reasonable than non-Chinese restaurants. A typical meal cost only 20 cents for soup, sandwich, and dessert.77 By 1923 the first Western-style Restaurant Owners’ Association was established in Toronto, with members in other cities and towns across Ontario.
There were two types of Chinese restaurants: one for Chinese clientele in Chinatown, the other for non-Chinese outside of Chinatown. Toronto Quick Lunch, at 301 Yonge Street in 1922, likely served Western fare, like roast beef and hamburgers.
Chinese restaurants in the 1930s provided “cheap meals,” a “bonanza for the many unemployed men who crowded the city during the Depressions years,” as recalled by George Heron in his memoirs.
On Queen Street near Sherbourne there were a couple of these restaurants which offered full course meals for 15 cents. By full course is meant soup, a Salisbury steak or fish main course with vegetables, a piece of pie and a drink of tea, coffee or milk. Not only that, each had plates piled high with white and brown bread.78
In 1929, as an 18-year-old, Doyle Lumb worked at the Rex Café on Yonge Street, near College Street. He recalled, “The Rex Café was considered one of the best restaurants. Got paid $3 a week. I worked every day, including Sunday, seven days a week from ten in the morning to ten at night.”79 Later, he owned the Kwong Chow Restaurant. Another early Chinese remembered working at both a laundry and restaurant:
If you were Chinese, there were only two things you could do — run a laundry or a restaurant. Our family did both. When I came home from school, I had to work in the restaurant, then I’d jump over to the laundry, work there before running back to school. You know, we didn’t serve Chinese food — nobody ate Chinese food then!80
Gradually, along with the standard Western fare, restaurants began serving Chinese food adapted for the Canadian palate. Their owners were unknowing innovators in making the Chinese restaurant business an ethnic specialty that would eventually attract loyal fans.
The