SoCal restaurants were already struggling with falling patronage and higher labor and food costs, particularly due to COVID and the Hollywood strikes. Now under the second Trump administration, goods coming into the U.S. face a baseline 10% tariff, and those from China face 14.5%. More tariffs are paused. And so, restaurants relying on imported ingredients are dealing with higher costs.
KCRW hears from two local restaurateurs trying to adapt to Trump’s new taxes on imports. Anthony Wang is chef and owner at Firstborn, a gourmet Chinese American restaurant in Chinatown’s Mandarin Plaza. Uyên Lê is head chef and owner of Bé Ù, a Vietnamese street food spot in Virgil Village.
Wang tells KCRW that when he opened Firstborn last month, he imported pantry goods directly from China. The original aim was to showcase China’s artisanship, but that’s no longer feasible with the price increases and supply drops. He has stopped purchasing all liquid pantry items from China.
Meanwhile, Bé Ù relies on a lot of regional specialties from Vietnam and China. “Rice paper or fish sauce, certain type of condensed milk, all of these things, I've … researched over a long time and decided these were the products I wanted, because this is how I wanted the flavor and the texture,” Lê says.
She points out that most restaurants have a 5-10% profit margin on good days. Plus, “even if we're not seeing huge price increases now, we know they're coming. And also there's just already a lot of disruptions on our supply chain.”
For Wang, consecutive weeks have gone by where his orders still haven’t been delivered, he says.
Now he’s considering switching to Japanese alternatives. “My parents are immigrants, and when they first moved to this country in 1989, they didn't have a huge access to Chinese traditional pantry items. And Japanese products were actually more accessible to them during that time. And so I grew up with my parents cooking exclusively with Japanese soy sauces and vinegars, as opposed to Chinese. So in a way, this is actually cooking that's a little bit closer to home now.”
As for rethinking the menu, Wang isn’t too worried, especially because Firstborn’s concept is broad. He explains, “It's an exploration of what Chinese American identity means in a modern context and through the lens of food. And so I think this is true for a lot of immigrant or ethnic American cuisines, in which immigrants cook how they know with the resources that they have readily available to them in the new world that they live in. And so a lot of the cooking requires them to be adaptive. And so I don't really find this to be terribly burdensome, but rather actually exciting and just another part of our ongoing story of trying to rediscover what Chinese American really means to us.”
Meanwhile, Lê says she’s taking a hard look at perishables, such as for her mango cucumber salad. The shelf-stable products, she says, “I'm not making Vietnamese food without rice paper or rice noodles or fish sauce. I'm not making Vietnamese iced coffee without really good condensed milk. I know it is my culture that I'm trying to express through food here, and I don't want to dilute it. It's very personal, and it's not just a financial decision.”
However, after four years in business, Bé Ù is “pretty bruised,” Lê says, and she has swept other business goals to the side.
At the same time, her oven recently broke. “We tried to fix it, but it's just on its last legs. … I was like, maybe I should get the loan now. Try to get the equipment now because if I wait a few months, then what are the prices going to be? Knowing that China produces about $55 billion worth of commercial restaurant equipment annually, and the U.S. produces about $6 billion,” she says.
Is this somehow a chance to get creative? That requires “some information of predictability,” Lê says. “Or else, you create something, but you can't really bring it to market. So to a certain extent, creativity is nice, but I'm a business, and I need some profit margin that makes sense. And if I'm spending so much time just trying to make something that may or may not work, I don't know about the consumer behavior demand side, that's a big unknown.”
The LA restaurant scene as a whole has “been through the ringer,” Lê says. The entertainment industry’s slowdowns and stops were particularly challenging, “in addition to what I think folks feel is a lower consumer confidence and sentiment in spending.”
Wang adds that restaurants make up a “selfless” industry. “During the fires, [it] was really, really amazing to see the outpour of support for those affected by the fires. … I think this means that there's a lot more knowledge about … how fragile the ecosystem or the economics of restaurants really are. Hopefully this means it'll garner more local support for small businesses.”