After 53 years, Newark’s beloved Jade Palace restaurant calls it quits

For more than 50 years Jade Palace has been a fixture in the Newark community, but that legacy is coming to an end as the Chinese-American family-run restaurant shutters for good.

For more than 50 years Jade Palace has been a fixture in the Newark community, serving chow mein and Mongolian beef to lifetime regulars and celebrities like rock musician Greg Kihn and pro wrestler Alexis Smirnoff.

But that legacy is ending on Dec. 21 when the restaurant in the Old Town Center shuts its doors for good. The family that runs Jade Palace is calling it quits following the death of family patriarch and restaurant cofounder, Edwin Yee Wing Lee, last winter.

“My dad fell and had a hemorrhage and eventually bled to death. He fought for a whole month in the hospital but did not make it,” says Phillip Lee, who’s been running the restaurant with family members ever since. “My dad, he was going to be 90 pretty soon, but he was still the Energizer Bunny. He was one of those kinds of guys who lived to work – for 50-odd years, he’d been working here every single day.”

Jade Palace has a generational history stretching back to the early 1950s, when Phillip Lee’s grandfather migrated from China to open a restaurant in Oakland. When Edwin Lee came to America with his family in 1962 he worked at that restaurant, then branched out to start Jade Palace in a rather unconventional way.

“My dad used to like driving around and for some reason he drove into Newark. He drove into this shopping center and there was a bar right there, and he goes in and has a beer and starts talking with somebody,” says Lee, who’s worked at his parent’s restaurant since age 10. (He’s now 63.)

That person turned out to be the owner of the establishment, then called Ike’s Bar. “Ike says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a restaurant here in the back. I really wish someone would rent it out and make the bar more lively.’ All we had to do was come up with a dollar’s rent, split the utility bill, and we were in.”

That was 1970. Over the years, Edwin Lee would run Jade Palace with his family – wife Chui Ngan Lee, sons Phillip and Jimmy, and daughter Susan – as your classic, Cantonese-inflected joint. The operation’s always been pretty old school. You won’t find an official website on Google, and the dishes hearken to menus you might’ve browsed in childhood: chop suey, boiled noodles, wontons in broth and the ever-popular Mongolian beef.

“Beef and broccoli, sweet-and-sour pork, the chow mein — you know, what people really like,” says Lee.

Jade Palace has been around so long it’s become a regular community meeting hub. “This place has been like that our whole lives — the place to hang out,” Lee says. “Anytime someone comes in here, it’s like a reunion. We talk about what Newark was like back in the day.”

“Jade Palace is one of those unique places that you don’t see much anymore, as longtime, family-run businesses seem to be few and far between,” says Franz Bruckner, a restaurant regular and family friend who lives in Newark.

“It is literally a meeting place for the local East Bay community,” Bruckner says. “Sometimes I see people I haven’t seen in years, other times it is a place to meet up with friends, catch a game or just catch up with old friends. … The Lee family has been so welcoming over the decades, and this love for the community and their customers has been an integral part of the city of Newark and the East Bay community as a whole.”

As word of the closure’s gotten out, regulars have poured in to get their last meals and hobnob with the Lee family.

“We’ve been having a party every day,” Lee says. “Everyone’s been hanging out here. Especially since we’ve been here all these years, people are going to miss us. We have customers who’ve been coming here for 30, 40, 50 years.”

After Jade Palace is gone an Indian kitchen is scheduled to move in. And Phillip Lee will have already started his retirement planning.

“Look, I’ve been doing this since I was 10 years old. Retirement actually looks pretty good to me now,” he says. “I can spend time with my kids, travel, work on my old vintage cars and my old bicycles.”

“We will miss all these people, though,” he adds. “They’ve been coming here for so long, they’re like family.”