Ask anyone who grew up eating in the San Gabriel Valley where to take a first-timer and you will get the same answer: the big plaza at Valley and Del Mar. It opened in 1992 on the footprint of a drive-in theatre, filled up with more than a dozen Chinese kitchens, and for thirty years functioned as the closest thing the SGV had to a town square. What nobody tells you is that it is currently being taken apart and put back together, and half the names you will search for are no longer behind the doors.
This plaza is mid-renovation, so the tenant list you find online is running months behind what is actually behind the doors. Ask Karpo which kitchens are open tonight, which floor they are on, and where to park so you are not circling the structure at seven.
First, the correction
The centre is now branded TAWA Gateway, a nod to the 99 Ranch Market that has anchored the twelve-acre site since 1990. On 30 June 2026 the owners announced they had finished the first phase of a multi-year redevelopment, with fourteen food, retail and entertainment tenants arriving through 2026 and into early 2027.
The part that matters if you are driving there tonight: two of the plaza's best-known restaurants are gone. Sam Woo BBQ in Suite 107 — the Cantonese roast-meat counter that appears in essentially every SGV guide ever written — has closed. So has Shanghai Restaurant upstairs, which most listings still show at Suite 211 or 212 depending on which aggregator you land on. Both still have live pages, menus and delivery listings. Neither will serve you dinner.
What replaced them is not a watering-down. It is a sharper spread of regions than the plaza had before.
Cantonese, and the only room open past midnight
New Capital Seafood sits on the fourth floor and is the survivor of the old guard, the big banquet room with live tanks and a full bar. It runs 8am to 1am daily, which makes it the answer to two completely different questions — dim sum, and where to eat at half past eleven when everything on the ground floor has gone dark.
For dim sum the window is narrower than the opening hours suggest. Service starts around 9am and winds down around 2:30pm, and the room is at its best near 11am, before the family tables land and after the kitchen has caught up. Parking in the structure is free, which in this part of Los Angeles is worth stating plainly.
Hunan, which is the one to order carefully
Dong Ting Chun took Suites 206 and 207 in March 2026. Hunanese cooking is the region people mix up with Sichuan and should not — less numbing peppercorn, more smoked and cured pork, more fresh and pickled chilli, more sourness. If you order it like Sichuan you will end up with a table of things that all taste of chilli and nothing else.
The useful move is to build the table around one smoked or cured dish, one steamed dish with chopped salted chilli on top, and one clean vegetable, then add heat from there. It is also the only kitchen in the plaza where the regional identity is the entire point rather than a menu section.
Taiwan, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia — the 2026 arrivals
Bafang Dumpling opened in June 2026 and does the pan-fried potsticker format that is a Taiwanese street-food staple rather than a banquet dish — fast, cheap, and the right call when you are between two other things.
Bingz Crispy Burger arrived in July 2026 with roujiamo, the Shaanxi flatbread sandwich that gets described as a Chinese hamburger by people who have not eaten one. It is chopped braised meat pressed into a baked, layered bread, and it travels well, which matters in a plaza where you may end up eating on a bench.
Happy Lamb, also July 2026, is Inner Mongolian lamb hot pot — a lighter, more herbal broth than the Chongqing style most Angelenos picture when they hear hot pot, built to showcase the lamb rather than bury it. Show Hot Pot followed in August 2026, making two hot pot rooms in one plaza, which tells you how the centre expects people to eat here.
Getting the visit right
Go on a weekday if you can. The plaza's parking structure is free but it is shared with a full-size 99 Ranch Market, and Saturday afternoon is the worst possible intersection of grocery run and dinner rush. The vertical layout is the other thing to plan around: the ground floor is fast and casual, the upper floors are where the sit-down rooms are, and there is no obvious signage telling you that from the parking lot.
More is coming. A second wave of tenants was slated for announcement in autumn 2026, and a Vietnamese com tam specialist is scheduled for March 2027. Which is the honest summary of this plaza right now: it is a good meal today and a different plaza in a year, and anything you read about it that is more than six months old is fiction.
Practical notes
The centre is at Valley Boulevard and Del Mar Avenue in San Gabriel, anchored by 99 Ranch. Parking is free in the structure and genuinely difficult on Saturday afternoons. New Capital Seafood is on the fourth floor, open 8am to 1am daily, with dim sum roughly 9am to 2:30pm and the best window around 11am. Dong Ting Chun is upstairs in Suites 206 and 207. Bafang Dumpling, Bingz and Happy Lamb all opened between June and July 2026 and Show Hot Pot in August, so review counts are low and not a signal either way. Sam Woo BBQ and Shanghai Restaurant have closed — do not build the trip around either, whatever the listing says.
Tags: #LosAngeles #SanGabrielValley #SGV #ChineseFood #RestaurantsNearMe #DimSum #HunanFood #HotPot #626Food #LAEats #ValleyBlvd #NeighborhoodGuide #LAFoodie #RegionalChinese #EatLocal
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which of these kitchens is open right now, which floor it is on, and whether the parking structure is worth attempting at this hour? Ask Karpo for the latest San Gabriel Valley updates, a sensible order for a table of four across two regions, and a nearby fallback for the nights when the plaza is at capacity.
