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• 1 2018-12-21T09:21:06-08:00 Second Generation Restaurants 6 plain 2018-12-21T18:29:34-08:00 Though business for Chinese restaurants in downtown Providence was so good in the 1940s to 1960s that one member of the Chin family would recall that "there was not one Chinese restaurant that failed" during that time, by the 1960s and especially the 1970s their prospects began to look bleak for a number of factors. When the Mee Hong finally closed on February 24, 1979, Danny Chin, the restaurant's owner, blamed the construction of the Interstate for sparking "an exodus to the suburbs". Another restaurant owner who remembers the 1960s pointed out another factor was a change in the law that prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays. Before the ban was lifted, only restaurants and theaters were open for business, meaning that most people spent Sundays at the movies or at a restaurant like the Chinese "anchor restaurants" downtown. But after stores of all kinds were allowed to open on Sundays, restaurant traffic dwindled on what used to be the busiest day of the week. Coupled with a boom in shopping malls throughout the state and the move to the suburbs, Chinese restaurants began struggling to keep afloat. Eventually, the "anchor restaurants" folded one by one. Luke's was the first to go in 1978, then Mee Hong in 1979. Ming Garden would survive until 1986 when it, too, shut down and removed the existence of Providence's Chinatown from the downtown landscape. The anchor restaurants, as one interviewee put it, "became history". 
  
  New restaurants began popping up in the smaller towns surrounding Providence as they grew larger in size. Many of the new restaurant owners were younger members of the original families of the "anchor restaurants", but many were also immigrants moving from another field of work into the restaurant business. These businesses settled into new communities, carrying with them similar menus of "American Chinese food" and building deep relationships with local residents. The stories of the relationships between restaurant owners and regulars echo with those from the "anchor restaurants", including tales of customers coming in at the same time every day. 
  
  Chinese Americans did not often go to these restaurants, because of the Americanized Chinese food served which drew in more "American" (usually meaning Euro-American) customers than Chinese ones. But this time period also saw the opening or re-branding of restaurants that now served more authentic food, such as Cantonese dishes or dim sum, for both Chinese Americans and adventurous patrons of other ethnicities.