At the strip mall restaurant Kingdom Dim Sum in East Hollywood, you can find the kind of Chinese food you might associate with the large immigrant communities of the San Gabriel Valley.
The restaurant opened in 2023 as a hangout spot for chefs Man Mo, a Hong Kong native, and his best friend Tony He, who’s from Guangzhou in southern China. Their hometowns were where dim sum first developed in 10th-century tea houses.
The duo met 20 years ago as cooks at a classic dim sum restaurant in Arcadia called Hop Li, and they’ve been hanging out ever since. They drink together, and talk on the phone after work shifts.
As an ice breaker, I asked the chefs to compare each other to an animal. Man said Tony would be a horse — smart and hard-working.
Tony said Man would be a bird — hardworking, but also because “birds get up early,” he explained through an interpreter. “And in the morning, I hear the birds chirping and I feel soothed. And then because it’s so soothing, it reminds me of him.”
Two years ago, Man turned 63. He was thinking about retirement. But his son, Laurence Mo, was not crazy about that idea.
Laurence was getting married and was about to move out of his father’s house. He worried his dad would be lonely and bored.
“When I move[d] out, he [would] maybe [be] only with my mom,” Laurence says. “Two people in a big house. So I believe[d] he wants something to do.”
So Laurence — a mortgage broker with no restaurant industry experience — took a big risk. He opened Kingdom Dim Sum.
Then he hired his dad’s best friend: Tony.
Kingdom Dim Sum owner Laurence Mo (right) and his father, chef Man Mo (left), stand in the restaurant’s kitchen. Credit: Jack Ross
Opening the restaurant was the perfect solution. Man got to cook with Tony — and dim sum is brain exercise of the highest order.
The dishes are brutally hard to make, as content creators across the internet attest.
Watching Man and Tony work, the recipes feel like magic tricks. Sleights of hand transform ingredients into unexpected shapes and textures.
In the kitchen, Tony pours a white liquid onto a cloth and closes it in a steamer. When it comes out, it still looks like milk. But it’s actually a gooey wrapper that he flicks and folds around a line of shrimp with a plastic card. He slices it into three pouches, and I finally recognize a dish I’ve been ordering for months: shrimp rice noodle rolls.
And Man and Tony think the rice noodle rolls are easy to make compared to their dan tat, a sweet-enough egg custard from Hong Kong. To get the shell as light as possible, they work the dough for three days. The LA Times raves that the finished crust is “as delicate as chalk.”
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Good press aside, there may be tough times ahead for the restaurant.
Laurence says that with inflation, they are only breaking even. And tariffs on Chinese goods probably mean it will cost more to import their ingredients.
“Everything is so expensive,” says Laurence. “Right now, for our business is pretty tough.”
But even if things get worse, Laurence doesn’t regret opening Kingdom Dim Sum.
He did it for his dad.
Man Mo makes fresh-to-order dishes at Kingdom Dim Sum. Credit: Jack Ross.
