Back then in the 2010’s

Nearly half of the restaurants included in Jonathan Gold's Counter Intelligence have closed. What does that mean?

The firmware of the integrated GPS in my 2015 Prius has never been updated, and sometimes I catch myself staring into the ancient touch screen that I have to hammer with my fingers, wondering why things felt so different back then in 2010’s.

My blue arrow traces the pixels of the recent past and old favorites load into view: crispy duck with panang curry at Red Corner Asia, Chego pork belly bowls after work, late night Eggs Sardou at Pacific Dining Car, screaming at Dodgers relievers we couldn’t name at OB Bear, packing 8-foot tables at Ocean Star, chicken hamburger and mixed chow mein and fried rice at Sawtelle Tempura House, corn-fried shrimp plates with hush puppies at Mel’s Fish Shack.

I’m 38 and fully washed now so let me say this with my chest, shoulders and ass: those were the days. Back when California burritos at Benitos Taco Shop in West LA were still the best way any of us could think of to end a night, before it became a berth in a ghost kitchen. Back when airport rides were still a thing and rent was $1,475 for a 2-bedroom and all my friends still lived in LA pursuing dumb dreams, none dumber than mine.

Before every inch of the city was geotagged and packed with modular residential boxes and mined for content. Back when we were all on the first few dozen streams of those Frank Ocean songs; when the cops didn’t kick you out of Mulholland, K-Top and Sunken City at night; when the Canter’s dining room never closed and Marty and Elayne hit the Dresden Room six days a week; when the words hidden gem and hole in the wall actually described something. Back when I’d drive the city with a blinking question mark over my heart, wanting nothing more than to be Anthony Bourdain and eat at all the restaurants Jonathan Gold reviewed.

Paging through the book Counter Intelligence today feels like flipping through an old yearbook. It’s still so much fun to read: the Alameda Swap Meet is the third entry, and he makes a great case. I moved to Los Angeles six years after it came out, and the city I came to love comes to life in these pages. Lately I’ve started to wonder if it still exists.

The other day I checked and close to half of the original 250-ish restaurants chronicled in Counter Intelligence have closed in the two decades since it came out. We could all name some reasons. Rising food and labor costs, each up more than 30 percent since 2019; private equity’s advance into commercial real estate; declining returns at the social media attention casino; Square, Doordash, Uber Eats and Grubhub platform fees on top of AmEx, Yelp and Google. Before the pandemic, restaurant buildouts were within reach of family savings and bank loans - now you basically need a funding round.

I used to think of fine dining as high art for the masses. But prices left the proletariat behind long ago. The costs that diners pay at restaurants rose nearly 40 percent between January 2019 and May 2026, according to the consumer price index. Customers are revolting and flocking to influencers willing to call restaurants a scam and complain about tipping. Never mind that restaurant operators, workers, and chefs feel the squeeze most acutely.

Developers are reshaping our neighborhoods to provide entertainment and stimulation as regularly as our feeds do. The average life of a restaurant in the L.A. dining scene has never felt shorter. Everything that I add to my Google Maps seems to close before I make it there. Independent operators decline in numbers as chain restaurant locations increase. Pop-up restaurants are becoming a permanent form of tenancy. Landlords are offering three-month leases.

Chinese food is one of the cuisines most affected by closures on Gold’s list, which gathers reviews primarily from his period writing for LA Weekly before 2000. Just four restaurants remain out of the original 30 or so he included - Lu’s Garden in San Gabriel, China Islamic and 888 Seafood in Rosemead, and Kim Chuy in Chinatown. Perhaps that’s surprising and perhaps not.

Over lunch at Lu’s Garden, I asked David Chan, the most seasoned Chinese food eater I know, if he expected more of Gold’s picks to still be open. He shrugged. Not really, he said.

Chinese restaurant turnover is so frequent that for decades, he’s been keeping a list of the properties where he’s noted the most churn. At one space, a strip mall storefront attached to the San Gabriel Hilton, he’s seen 14 different restaurants.

I asked David, now 77, if there were any closures over the years he has been particularly affected by. He couldn’t think of any, actually. He’s been busy trying new places - he recently blogged about noticing a distinct upgrades in Chinese restaurant decor.

As diners, Chinese people are famously unsentimental. We can be intensely loyal but also demanding, attached to our own ideas about how everything should cost, shaped by memories of hunger, poverty and struggle. We’re sad when a place closes down, but we usually have some theories as to why. There’s no need to mourn. Eventually we’ll relocate the chef’s cooking, or someone trained like him, in a strip mall somewhere. The flavors are what connect us to our memories and the restaurants are just the caretakers.

Chinese restaurants don’t dwell much on the past, quick to adopt new tech like robot waiters, delivery apps and ordering kiosks. When diners signaled they wanted to consume content from screens at dim sum, restaurant designers made them big enough to cover entire walls and wrap around pillars.

This inexhaustible entrepreneurship confers a certain longevity upon many Chinese dishes and flavors.

I’ve been eating Langer’s #19 sandwich and Kang Kang Food Court’s sheng jian bao on a quarterly basis for about two decades now, and I’m equally attached to both. But I’m almost certain I’ll be able to find another juicy, crisp sheng jian bao with a similarly porky flavor somewhere in the 626. That same is probably true for a good Taiwanese beef noodle, a Hong Kong breakfast and a Northern Chinese soy milk. Our pastrami sandwiches, on the other hand, feel more like endangered Southern California mountain lions; serviced by an fractured ecosystem of rye bread and old-school butchery.

I was sad when Wah’s Golden Hen on Virgil Avenue closed in 2020. But I knew that owner Lena Louie didn’t have any successors ready. And I was glad to know that she and her husband, a career cook who toiled in Chinatown kitchens, would finally be getting some rest. In the three decades since they immigrated to the States they had never visited their relatives in China a single time. I like to imagine them all on a cruise somewhere.

Perhaps some of Counter Intelligence’s closed restaurants also found relief in their endings, not failure, or grief. But I have yet to find anyone serving chow mein the way Lena and her husband made it, a unique texture, meat ratio and portion size agreed upon by all the Chinese-food loving residents of Virgil Village between the years 1972 to 2020.

We’re supposed to venerate this cycle of destruction and reinvention as a poetic process of creative renewal. We like to imagine that our neighborhoods are remade in the fire just as the brushlands, forests and coastal plains have been for eons.

But I’ve never been able to see what Los Angeles does to its history as anything but a lot clearing. We raze the past and fill the space with whatever makes for a quick buck. Then we preserve only the memories that are useful as marketing.

Some of us get to sink our roots deep into the land and reach fearlessly for the horizon. The rest of us learn to content ourselves with the brief lives we can scrape from disturbed soil.

Last year, when Mandarin Noodle House in Monterey Park caught fire and closed after nearly 50 years witnessing the region’s transformation from a white sububan enclave to a center of Latino and Asian political power, there were no articles written. Denny Mu, whose family ran the place, launched a GoFundMe that fell short of a $28,000 fundraising goal. David’s post marking the closure is still the restaurant’s only obituary.

But the emails, posts and texts flew that day among the people who knew. As for myself, I never made it there.