Some restaurants close because the city moved on. New Garden is closing for almost the opposite reason: the city never stopped coming, but the people who have carried the place into its ninth decade can no longer carry it themselves. The Chinese restaurant at Central Avenue and Hadley Street, just south of downtown at 823 S. Central Ave., will serve its last meals at the end of October 2026, according to the Arizona Republic. It opened in 1942. Do the math the way its regulars do, and that is 84 years of lunches, family dinners and standing orders on one corner of the old warehouse district.
The Republic describes New Garden as Phoenix's last chop suey house, and that label matters. Chop suey houses were the storefronts of an earlier Chinese immigrant community that settled in the warehouse district south of downtown, cooking an Americanized Chinese menu for a city that was still finding its shape. Long after that community dispersed and downtown reinvented itself several times over, this one room kept cooking the same way. The Republic's reporting on the restaurant's history notes that its recipes — the Americanized Chinese standards it was built on — have stayed essentially unchanged since the 1940s.
A Family Relay, Run Four Times
New Garden's history reads less like a business timeline than a family relay race. It was opened in 1942 by Kam Yee Tse, known to many simply as Mary. When her husband died in 1970, a relative, Wing Quong Ong, stepped into the kitchen and kept the stoves lit. In 1985 the baton passed again within the extended family: Bill Kwan and his father, Yancey, also relatives, bought the restaurant. Then in 2015 it changed hands once more, to its current owners — Run Qun Feng, her husband Gui Chang Zhang and her brother-in-law Tom Tang. Four ownership eras, one menu, one corner. Restaurants rarely survive a single handoff intact; New Garden survived three without losing the plot.
That continuity is what regulars actually taste. The Republic's historic-restaurants coverage has described the restaurant's enormous deep-fried egg rolls — the kind of thing a first-timer might glance at and mistake for a fried burrito — and generations of neighborhood customers whose usual orders the owners recognized on sight, before a word was spoken. That is not a marketing line. That is what 84 years on one corner buys you: a dining room where the menu is memorized in both directions, by the kitchen and by the customers.
Not Slow Business — A Hard Job, Late in Life
The reason for the closing deserves to be stated plainly, because it is not the usual one. Former owner Bill Kwan told the Arizona Republic on October 14 that the current owners, now in their late 60s and early 70s, are selling not because business has fallen off, but because of medical issues and the sheer physical toll of the work. Anyone who has watched a small family restaurant operate knows what that toll looks like: the prep, the lifting, the heat, the hours, repeated daily for a decade since they took over in 2015 — and for the owners of a place like this, there is no bench to sub in. When the people are the restaurant, the restaurant's schedule is written by their health.
It is, in its way, a respectful ending to arrange. Rather than run the room at half strength until it fades, the owners are closing at the end of October while New Garden is still itself — and, crucially, they are looking for what comes next rather than simply locking the door.
The Search for a Fifth Act
According to the Arizona Republic, Realty One Group's Mike Snitz is seeking a new owner-operator willing to keep the tradition alive, with some updates planned once the restaurant closes. That phrasing — a new owner-operator, not just a buyer for the real estate — is the hopeful part of this story. The early regulars Snitz name-checked to the Republic give a sense of the room's reach across Phoenix life: Mary Rose Wilcox, Jerry Colangelo and Charlie Keating all ate there in its earlier years. A place that fed politicians, sports power brokers and warehouse-district neighbors off the same menu was never just a restaurant. It was one of the rooms where Phoenix mixed.
Whether a successor keeps the name, the menu, or both is the open question of the next few months. What is not in question is the deadline for everyone else. If New Garden has ever been on your list — or if it has been your place for years and you want one more of those egg rolls, one more plate made the way it has been made since the 1940s — you have until the end of October. That is the whole window. After that, Phoenix's last chop suey house becomes a memory with an address, unless someone steps up to run its fifth act.
For more restaurant news and Southwest coverage, browse the latest on Previously's news hub, read about a very different kind of opening in our story on Lilli, the new French tasting-menu room in Las Vegas's Chinatown, or follow today's other Phoenix story, on the statues missing from Cancer Survivors Park.
