Good Eats: The Restaurants of Toronto’s First Chinatown

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Elizabeth Street

A black and white photograph of a street intersection. The streets are quiet and one pedestrian crosses the road. A stop sign reads: "Stop Through Street". Cars are parked on the right side of the street.

Elizabeth Street, looking south from Dundas Street, September 27, 1930. Courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives.

A black and white photograph depicting a street scene. A series of one and two-storey buildings can be seen behind a row of electric poles. The largest building has a sign out front that reads "International Chop Suey House."

Elizabeth Street, looking north from Louisa Street, 1955. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

Black and white photograph of a young women in a dress reclining against a display case inside a fruit and grocery store.

Jean Lumb, age 17, inside her fruit and grocery store in Toronto, 1936. Courtesy of Arlene Chan.

Black and white photograph of a woman standing at the back of a moving convertible car, speaking into a megaphone. A young girl holding a paper lantern is seated beside her. Signs for Chinese businesses are visible in the background.

Jean Lumb during the Save Chinatown campaign, Toronto, 1960s. Courtesy of Arlene Chan.

Home of Toronto’s First Chinatown

Elizabeth Street was once a bustling corridor for St. John’s Ward (also known generally as “the Ward”), the centre of Toronto’s Chinese community in the early twentieth century. Despite local and national discriminatory legislation against the Chinese community, the neighbourhood surrounding Elizabeth Street became a thriving commercial centre, featuring theatres, laundries, and restaurants, including the first Chinese-owned restaurant in Toronto, Sing Tom’s Cafe, which opened nearby at 37 ½ Queen Street in 1901. By 1922, Toronto was home to more than 100 Chinese-owned restaurants, many of which were located in the Ward.

Eating out on Elizabeth Street

Close to Toronto City Hall (now Old City Hall) and Eaton’s department store, these Chinese restaurants became popular destinations for both locals and tourists. The nearby Shea’s Hippodrome, a large vaudeville theatre once located on Queen and Bay Streets, also brought clientele to Elizabeth Street restaurants: Hollywood legend Edward G. Robinson allegedly preferred to dine at Hung Fah Low and Jung Wah’s restaurant at 12 ½ Elizabeth Street when in town. But Chinese restaurateurs often faced discrimination and abuse. Police raids were common and many Chinese-owned businesses suffered under discriminatory legislation. In 1914, a provincial law was introduced to prohibit white women from working in Chinese-owned restaurants, which reflected not only the era’s stereotypes regarding female fragility but also its widespread anti-Chinese racism.

Kwong Chow Restaurant

During the 1940s and 1950s, many notable Chinese-owned restaurants opened in the neighbourhood, including Lichee Garden (opened 1948) and Sai Woo (opened 1957). One of the most popular and enduring restaurants in this early neighbourhood was Jean and Doyle Lumb’s Kwong Chow, once located on 126 Elizabeth Street.

A restaurant legacy on Elizabeth Street

Born in British Columbia in 1919 to parents who had emigrated from Guangzhou, China, Jean Lumb (born Toy Jin Wong) moved to Toronto in 1936 and opened a fruit and grocery store north of the area at Bathurst Street and St. Clair Avenue. In 1939, she married Doyle Lumb.

In 1959, Jean and Doyle Lumb opened the Kwong Chow restaurant on Elizabeth Street in the heart of Toronto’s Chinese community; it became one of the first restaurants in Toronto to serve dim sum. The Lumbs owned Kwong Chow until 1985, when they sold the restaurant to several of its waitstaff.

Jean Lumb

Alongside her work as a restaurateur, Jean Lumb was also a tireless advocate for the Chinese community in Toronto. Beginning in the 1950s, Lumb worked to change Canada’s discriminatory immigration laws, which limited Chinese immigration only to spouses and children of Canadian citizens. As President of the Chinese Women’s Association, Lumb travelled to Ottawa to protest existing Chinese immigration policies, which were overturned in phases: first in 1957 and again in 1967.

Restaurateur and community advocate

Jean Lumb took up another community issue in the 1960s. The Elizabeth Street neighbourhood had already faced expropriation and demolition for the new City Hall project (opened in 1965), located at Queen and Bay Streets, throughout the 1940s and 1950s. As the city grew and the area around the new City Hall became more valuable, the community continued to face threats of further development and construction. As part of the Save Chinatown Committee, Jean Lumb worked to protect Chinatown’s businesses, stretching from Bathurst Street to University Avenue. In 1976, Lumb was appointed to the Order of Canada, the first restaurateur and first Chinese-Canadian woman to receive the honour.

Sources

Arlene Chan, The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2011.

Ellen Scheinberg and Paul Yee, “Toronto’s early Chinese restaurants attracted both gourmets and goons”, The Star, June 7, 2015.

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