Dining at Empire Garden in Boston’s Chinatown is a big affair. From the moment you turn the corner onto Washington Street, you are drawn toward the larger-than-life marquee shouting “EMPIRE GARDEN,” “DIM SUM,” and “EXOTIC COCKTAILS” in bold yellow letters against a striking red background. The exotic Far East is now showing daily, open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Empire Garden is housed in what was previously Boston’s Globe Theater, designed by the renowned architect Arthur Vinal and built in 1903. The grandeur of the dim sum restaurant echoes the faded glamor of the neo-rococo theater that once staged burlesque and vaudeville shows.
After decades of hosting vaudeville shows, in 1947 the Globe Theater was reincarnated as Loew’s Center Theater, a double-feature movie house. In 1977 it was bought by David Wong, a Chinese American businessman, and transformed into the Pagoda, a movie theater specializing in Hong Kong action films. Finally, in 1995, Mr. Wong turned the Pagoda into Empire Garden on the mezzanine level and Jia Ho Supermarket on the ground floor.
In many ways the site is still a venue for spectacles, as Empire Garden transports visitors to an imaginary world through the playful use of light, ornamentation, and space. The restaurant sits on the edge of Asiatic alterity and a hybrid American/East Asian culture, and as such captures contemporary attitudes toward East Asian culture in the United States.
The Journey
Our journey begins at the corner of Washington Street and Beach Street, at the heart of Boston’s historic Chinatown. As we approach the restaurant’s marquee, we find ourselves at a busy intersection inundated with foot traffic and the sound of cars. The restaurant entrance, a modest set of double glass doors, is located just beneath the marquee’s canopy, leading us into the vestibule. The vestibule is a dim, narrow space functioning as a passageway to transition visitors from the streets of Boston to the world of Empire Garden. Despite the absence of staff members by the door, a red carpet directs customers to the staircase ahead.
After traversing the narrow hall, visitors emerge through a large opening. The ceiling is suddenly elevated, and guests are greeted by a vaulted ceiling with painted clouds against a blue background that mimics the sky. A small chandelier punctuates the portal and invites the traveler to continue ascending. Here we start to notice decorative objects that hint at the qualities of an “Asiatic” garden. Flanking either side of the staircase are fake bamboo plants and a Chinese painting featuring a lone pine tree. “Nature” is a running motif throughout the restaurant, staying true to the “Garden” in its name. The restaurant also makes visual nods to glamour and luxury in details such as columns painted to look like black marble with white veining. Although these cosmetic interventions are neither precise nor faithful representations, they stake out a position.
Where the red carpet deposits visitors at the end of the vestibule, blue LED lights lining the outer edges of the vaulted ceiling lead them to the next phase of their journey, up the staircase and onto the mezzanine where the reception desk is located at the end of another long red carpet. Emerging from the stairwell and stepping into a spacious area flooded with natural light, visitors revel in a sense of arrival. The light comes from a large arched opening that faces onto the street, adorned with red paper lanterns. The red carpet continues past the reception desk and into the main area: the grand theater turned into a banquet hall.
Imagery and Meaning
Entering the theater, visitors are arrested by a sudden shift in scale as the horizon dramatically widens. A terraced ceiling climbs up to a magnificent forty-foot-high vault, and the eye is instantly drawn to a framed opening outlined with colored LED lighting that identifies what used to be the proscenium stage. Rococo-inspired reliefs crown the stage, along with a mural depicting mountains and castles lit by a full moon in a mythical scene. Niches flank the stage with scalloping details accented in gold, brilliantly lit by a chandelier.
Murals and prints cover the entire dining hall, illustrating scenes of traditional Chinese gardens depicted through intricate lattice windows. They feature exotic birds, such as peacocks and parrots, perched on cherry blossom branches that stretch across the walls. Combined with the faded rococo splendor of the original theater, these Asiatic and Euro-American decorative elements commingle in an uncanny marriage where two cultural narratives, that of the East and the West, depict “nature” with a unified front.
The lavishly decorated columns flanking either side of the stage feature cherubic faces on their capitals, framed by flowing acanthus leaves. Though reductive copies of their predecessors, they still carry hints of the Western context, and as such function as what Umberto Eco calls “sign vehicles.”1 Similarly, the geometric flower reliefs adapted from the Eastern context are laden with symbolic significance. At Empire Garden, sign vehicles of two disparate contexts converge in one space. They operate independently and in tandem to achieve a world-building effect. Whether that effect highlights Asiatic alterity or a hybrid American/East Asian culture is up for debate.
Ornamentation not only communicates nuanced and ever-changing cultural narratives, it also has the power to lend visibility. Literary scholar and cultural theorist Anne Anlin Cheng describes the critical role of ornaments in making the Asian female body visible. Cheng argues that Afong Moy, the first known female Chinese immigrant to the United States who was exhibited as “The Chinese Lady,” only became visible within a larger composition of furnishings that translated the imagery of the exotic Far East and into domestic, Western spaces.2 At Empire Garden, ornamentation not only carries semiotic weight but also renders the restaurant visible. Like the Asian female body, the restaurant relies on ornamentation for presence. The highly curated ornaments in Empire Garden speak not just to “fantasies of the Orient,” but to a curious, hybrid character of the East and the West. This identity has led to the restaurant’s continued success since its opening in 1995.
Staging Authenticity
Within any restaurant, the atmosphere—achieved by ornamentation, lighting, spatial configuration, and quality of service, among other meticulously considered elements—is arguably just as important as the food. Restaurants are, after all, not just in the business of selling food, but experiences. Chinese restaurants that cater primarily to what landscape architect Dean MacCannell calls “tourists,” such as Empire Garden, are particularly concerned with what he refers to as “staged authenticity.”3 Building on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of front and back regions of social establishments, where the front acts as a public-facing meeting place for hosts and guests, and the back is a more private area open only to members, MacCannell illustrates how tourist attractions employ front and back regions to build narratives. According to MacCannell, front regions are often staged to appear like back regions, because back regions, which are assumed to be an exclusive environment, are alluring to tourists seeking something “intimate and real." 4
Empire Garden is designed to sequence visitors’ movement from front to back regions. The entry sequence that takes visitors from the narrow, cavernous passageway on the street to the magnificent banquet hall on the mezzanine reveals the restaurant in stages and transports visitors from the real world to an imaginary one. The linear trajectory suggests how spaces are meant to be used and experienced.
A New Hybrid Identity
Empire Garden inherited not only the rococo ornamentations of the old Globe Theater, but also the spatial hierarchies inherent in the theater’s structure. The linearity of the spatial relations existed before Empire Garden existed, and were adapted to the restaurant’s needs when the building was repurposed. Empire Garden embodies narratives both past and present and provides a rich opportunity to examine how ornaments and their deliberate organization within spatial hierarchies communicate diverging narratives. Perhaps the worldbuilding project Empire Garden takes up is not of ancient China but of the contemporary United States trying to make sense of what MacCannell calls a “prison house of signs.” 5 Empire Garden is a cultural artifact uniquely situated in time and space, embracing a hybrid identity that is neither Chinese nor Euro-American.
Umberto Eco, “A Componential Analysis of the Sign /Column/,” Semiotica 5, no. 2 (1972).
Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2018), 82-84.
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 91-107.
MacCannell, The Tourist, 94.
MacCannell, The Tourist, xx.
