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Chinatown might be Fresno’s best food neighborhood.
Having lived in and traveled all over California, I think you could make a strong case for Fresno’s Chinatown as California’s most peculiar neighborhood, housing some of its most enduring contradictions.
There is a sense of the rundown about it, with grime and empty storefronts, but at the same time, it’s impossible not to stand on F Street or Kern without picturing what the place must’ve looked like in 1922 or 1947. In a world of fake “Old Wests” and dubious tourist attractions, Fresno’s Chinatown – an 18-block rectangle, tucked between the 99 freeway, Fresno Street and Ventura Street just west of Chukchansi Park across the railroad tracks – still evokes boomtowns and the American frontier, entirely without trying. It’s very easy to imagine Model Ts tottering down its wide streets.
Ironically, a lot of that effect may come down to simple neglect — but in a way where neglect and preservation seem like kissing cousins. Chinatown has been neglected, sure, but it also hasn’t changed. You could make the case that, through it all, it retains a bit more of its soul.
In another singular peculiarity, Chinatown might be Fresno’s best food neighborhood. The local business owners here will certainly tell you so. And it’s hard not to acknowledge some convincing evidence for the claim.
When a restaurant survives for 20, 50, 100 years in a neighborhood that isn’t particularly known for its foot traffic, you know it’s probably pretty good. Tourist traps? Fresno doesn’t have them.
Go to almost any “historic downtown” anywhere in the country, and you’re likely to find a few constants: limited, expensive parking, yuppies and overpriced, probably overrated food. Fresno’s Chinatown, by contrast, has wide streets, ample parking, and fantastic, cheap food options, largely patronized by blue-collar regulars. Real people, real food. Chinatown is historic in a way that lives and breathes. It’s honestly hard to think of many analogs for it.
“This is Chinatown, but there’s no Chinese food,” laughs Morgan Doizaki, owner of Chinatown’s Central Fish Company.
The lack of Chinese food is a slight exaggeration, but he’s not off-base about the name being a bit of a misnomer. Just down the street, a window mural renders Fresno as “Friends Know,” with Japantown underneath, a subtle-ish joke about “Chinatown” being more noticeably Japanese than Chinese.
“Historically, this was the downtown for non-white people,” Doizaki says. “It was the downtown for the Japanese and the Filipinos and the 11 cultures that we say founded Chinatown. This was where we had to do business, because for us, this was the downtown.”
As to how things came to be that way, the short answer is redlining. That’s the historical practice whereby banks, insurance companies, and governments systematically denied services to certain customers based on race – an ugly practice that, in its own inadvertent way, ended up creating its own kind of vibrant cultural stew here.
“Redlining existed, and if you looked like me, you couldn’t run a business on the other side of the train tracks,” Doizaki says, in view of the actual train tracks separating Central Fish from Chukchansi Park. “So, this is a place where we didn’t all speak the same language, but where we had to do business.
“It was a product of redlining, plus a long line of past politicians’ way of doing things. That’s why there’s so much dirt, and so many empty lots, because people in Chinatown were forced to tear things down,” Doizaki says. “There was a huge gap of disinvestment. The last thing that was ever built in Chinatown was Central Fish, in 1979.”
For now, Chinatown embraces its funkiness.
But there are signs on the horizon that things are changing. The city is giving out $20 million in loans to developers ready to build in Chinatown, part of the nearly $300 million Gavin Newsom pledged to downtown Fresno, alongside a high-speed rail station.
“With the high-speed rail coming in, the state’s largest project ever, happening in Chinatown, we’ve seen more activity here in the last five years than in the previous 50,” Doizaki says. “I think now is the time, when there’s investment being put back into Chinatown, that we should really appreciate the businesses that are still here.”
All of which is to say that the present is an exciting time for Chinatown. The high-speed rail station isn’t here yet, but new housing is going up, and people are paying attention to the area in ways that they haven’t in years. There are projects poised to bring to the area the foot traffic that it has historically lacked. And in the meantime, there are still plenty of reasons to drop by in your car.
Our advice? Get there before 2 or 3 pm. Chinatown is more of a breakfast-and-lunch neighborhood. And visit an ATM first, some of its best spots only take cash. The good news is that you’ll get a fair deal, and you definitely won’t leave hungry.
Chinatown offers plenty of options for food, from breakfast to dessert, but below, in no particular order, are some of our favorites.
Ho Ho Kafe
I’m not typically the kind of person who rhapsodizes diners. They are, basically by definition, not the kinds of places where the menu items jump off the page, demanding to be sampled. Diners are more habit-forming than user-friendly; you need to form a personal relationship with a diner. But, you can usually tell pretty quickly when you’re in a good one, usually right about the time the food arrives.
Ho Ho Kafe is both that, and something more: Both the beau ideal of a greasy spoon and a notable exception to Morgan Doizaki’s “no Chinese food” description of Chinatown (though, in classic Chinatown fashion, the owners are Lao and also serve Japanese and American food). You can get classic diner breakfast food like omelets and hot links with eggs, or go the lunch route and get Japanese yakisoba or Chinese chow mein. The only obvious throughline is absurdly large portions at a fair price (cash only!)
What to try
Recommending breakfast or noodles is like choosing a favorite child. Most of the breakfasts come served atop an entire plate covered with crispy hash browns. The hash brown portions, in fact, are so big they make the eggs seem like garnish (truly a place after my own heart).
All options work, but personally I’d go with the pork chop and eggs ($10). The pork chops come thin and crispy, covered in grilled onions (and jalapeños if you want them, which I do). If it’s lunch you’re after, you can’t go wrong with any of the chow meins ($14 for chicken, beef, or pork), served well-charred on a massively piled plate. You may need to bring a friend to help you finish.
Cuca’s
7 am – 1 pm daily.
I’ll be honest: I was a little apprehensive about going inside Cuca’s. The exterior is dark and a little foreboding, beneath a sign where “BEER” and “CASH ONLY” are listed almost as prominently as the name. If you arrive after 1 pm, as I have, you might see a padlock on the door. It looks like the kind of place where a cowpoke might fly out the window and land on the sidewalk out front following a poker dispute.
And yet, stepping inside instantly unlocked deep sense memories of every beloved sit-down Mexican place I ever begged my parents to take me as a child. It feels like an abuela’s living room, with patterned wall paper, waxy booths, and a shrine to 1970s Raiders coach Tom Flores astride the cash register (the pride of Sanger!). I loved it on sight.
Two lovely ladies service the entire modest dining room – Mercedes on tables, Pilar on the grill. The food feels like the original inspiration for Taco Bell, with crispy shelled tacos (do not tell me they’re not “authentic,” I love them), rice and beans, saucy enchiladas, and burritos wrapped in charred, bubbly tortillas. Like a Mexican equivalent of Ho Ho Kafe, they also have an entire breakfast page with the classics, along with classics so classic you probably forgot about them, like “huevos con wienies” (hot dogs) for $13.95.
What to try
I think you could pick any of your favorite old school Mexican-American classics and be OK, but for me nothing hits like a chile relleno ($6.95 a la carte or $11.95 as a meal). Cuca’s serves one of the freshest, best ones I’ve had in town. I’ve written in the past about the “bean test,” in which I express the belief that you can tell a lot about an old school Mexican place by their beans (and further suggest that maybe you should be able to sample them out front, like a taster of wine or beer). Again, Cuca’s serves some of the best in town. (And trust me, I’ve sampled a lot).
When I lived in New York for grad school and Mexican food was harder to come by, and classic refried pinto beans were almost unheard of (almost always black beans out there), I would go to bed dreaming about exactly the kind of slightly soupy, refried comfort beans Cuca’s serves. They taste like childhood.
Chef Paul’s
Despite having “only” been operating since 2010 (with the public-facing restaurant dating to around 2015), if you could choose just one place as the retail anchor of Fresno’s Chinatown, it’d be hard to argue against Chef Paul’s Café. Paul Pearson is the undisputed king of local southern and soul food, with plenty of accolades to his name.
Aside from boasting of having cooked for “Elvis Presley, Earth Wind and Fire, and four U.S. presidents,” Pearson’s flagship restaurant has since been recommended by everyone from Joe Rogan to Tyra Banks, made Buzzfeed’s list of 30 black-owned restaurants to try in 2019, and won more local restaurant awards than we have time to list here. It’s always a favorite of visiting luminaries. Listing any more superlatives here almost does it a disservice. Just go.
What to try
This is a tough one, since Chef Paul’s is the kind of place that gives me anxiety attacks trying to choose just one thing (I recommend going in a group so you can share), and because the menu changes often. In terms of perennials, the chicken and waffles ($13.95) will never do you wrong, and the shrimp and grits, when they’re on the menu, are always a hit.
La Elegante
There are only a small handful of Fresno taquerias that could plausibly lay claim to being “Fresno’s most famous taqueria,” and La Elegante is one of them. They’ve won three Taco Truck Throwdown awards, including a clean sweep in 2014. In 2016, the Food Network cited their adobada tacos on their list of the 30 best things to eat in California. Taco Truck Throwdown cofounder Mike Osegueda has called La Elegante and El Premio Mayor “the Pat’s vs Geno’s steaks of Fresno tacos.”
You would never know all this from the outside, where the sign simply reads “La Elegante,” with no superlatives, and no framed accolades (though the sign is pretty new – elegant, one might even say). The vibe is, “if you don’t know, ask somebody.”
Founder Benito Arenas died in 2022 and his son Abel has since taken over, with the place looking much the way it always has: a modest dining room with a line of booths, and a long bar counter where you can sit and watch the family make tacos on the flat top. Think: short order cook, Mexican-style. If you ask this writer, short order cooks are the glue that holds societies together.
What to try
It won’t blow anyone’s mind for me to cite the adobada taco ($3.50) here, but sometimes the conventional wisdom is correct. It’s a must-try. Essentially the flat-top (plancha)-cooked cousin of an al pastor (cooked on the vertical grill called a trompo) the adobada is a red-chile marinated pork that combines that spicy/sticky/sweet taste of the marinade with the char from the hot grill. Then they add finely sliced cabbage, onions, a smoky red chile salsa (chiles de arbol, if my taste buds are correct), and La Elegante’s unique spin on guacamole. We haven’t asked for their secret, but it’s slightly lighter in color, thicker and creamier than a watery taqueria guacamole, but not as thick and chunky as the chips-and-dip version. Whatever it is, it makes for a nice cooling counterpoint to the sticky pork and smoky salsa.
Central Fish Company
If the defining characteristics of Chinatown restaurants are historic, delicious, budget-friendly and working class, there’s probably no single establishment that embodies this combination better than Central Fish Company. I have hazy memories of my grandfather taking me here when I was barely old enough to walk. And it’s still one of the best places in Fresno to get a cheap lunch.
Originally opened in 1950 and expanding into its current location in 1979, it’s more than just a restaurant. It’s also a Japanese grocery store and a bustling fish market and wholesaler, where you can get everything from raw jumbo shrimp to rice crackers to freshly made sushi.
“When my great uncle started this store, there was another business here called Fresno Fish in Chinatown that catered to the Japanese community, and they pretty much stuck just to that,” says Morgan Doizaki. “But my great uncle, Akira Yokomi, was born in Chinatown, was in the army, was interned – and when he opened up this place in 1950, he didn’t cater just to the Japanese people. He catered to African-Americans, the Hispanic community, and brought in what they wanted. Honestly, if he didn’t do that, I don’t think we’d be here today.”
Now, Doizaki says, he stocks a unique mix of Japanese, American, Bayou, and Hawaiian products that helps keep Central Fish a draw for the surrounding communities. And if you want to get fresh seafood, you could do a lot worse than getting it from where restaurants get theirs.
What to try
In short, anything raw, anything fried.
A good motto for Central Fish would be “everything fresh, nothing fancy,” and that’s about what you can expect from any food on the restaurant side. During my last visit, I opted for the “Inflation Fighter” – two pieces of fish, two shrimp tempura, one scoop of rice and a fountain drink for the insane price of $9.22. It’s kind of like the discerning adult’s version of fish stick lunch from the school cafeteria. If only that fish had been fresh, hand-breaded, and fried to order.
Pro tip: Get some of the tartar sauce from the giant tub with the pump dispenser, and mix that with the Tapatio hot sauce and a little lemon. Boom, instant spicy-creamy dipping sauce.
Tamale Mama
One of the newest additions to the Chinatown restaurant scene, Tamala Mama grew from a viral TikTok account to a brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2023, complete with a front-page feature in The Fresno Bee. The titular Tamala Mama is Cristina Leon, with her son, Ruben Vasquez, running their social media. Ruben helped his mother go from working 10 hours a day in a meatpacking plant just four years ago to 366,000 TikTok followers today.
Tamales are sort of a specialty within a specialty in Mexican cuisine – labor intensive, comforting, the kind of food often reserved for special occasions. They’re the kind of thing you might go out of your way for, in order to recapture a particular sense memory. Which makes them perfect for a “special trip” kind of neighborhood like Chinatown.
Tamale Mama in particular does a wonderful job of mixing tradition with innovation – taking a classic tamale and sticking it in a bowl of equally classic pozole for their “tamazole” – sort of a corn-based, Mexican riff on a matzo ball soup.
What to try
I know I just praised the tamazole ($10), and I stand by it, but if I could choose just one thing to order, it would be, hands down, the jalapeño-cheese tamale ($3.50), arguably the simplest thing on the menu. Sure, it’s only moist masa, spicy jalapeño, and melty cheese, but something about the combination in just the right proportions makes it more than the sum of its parts. They also make great salsas.
Kogetsu-Do
At 111 years old, Kogetsu-Do is indisputably Chinatown’s most historic food vendor. Founded by husband and wife Sugimatsu and Sakino Ikeda family in 1915, it was briefly run by a Chinese family when the Ikedas were interned during World War II before they returned in 1944. Their granddaughter, Lynn Ikeda, now runs the business, and, legend has it, with the family’s original recipes.
It’s a great place to get a snowcone (strawberry or lemonade), ice cream, mochi, or any number of random trinkets. Sometimes they have manju, a Japanese pastry. Just make sure to wear a mask (store requirement), bring cash, and try to get there during the limited opening hours.
What to try
The place isn’t reinventing the wheel with their two flavors of syrupy-sweet snowcones ($5, $7, and $9), though hearing the old machine power up is an experience in and of itself, and they do hit the spot on one of Fresno’s many 100-degree days. If you can only try one thing, I’d probably go with the ice-cream-filled mochi ($5), though I would suggest letting it warm up for five to 10 minutes before you try biting in, if you value your dental work.
Great article Vince! Can’t wait to explore the options there. Hope to try a few of these places soon.