08/04/2022
August 2022
To our dear guests, customers, friends, and family,
This month we are celebrating our 40-year anniversary. With bittersweet news, we sadly will be closing our doors on Friday, September 16, 2022.
The Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant first opened in 1982. It is a family-operated establishment that has happily served fresh-made, handmade, delicious Chinese food in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
We have been operating seven days a week, 363 days a year, closing only for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
By our rough estimation, we have served over:
200,000 lbs of rice (averaging 100 lbs a week)
500,000 handmade egg rolls
1,000,000 handmade wontons
1,000 gallons of homemade duck sauce
Thank you for your loyal patronage.
You have kept us in business through ten presidencies, two recessions, eight blizzards, one Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Championship, and a global pandemic. We have consistently prepared our food with the same recipes and served it to you for over four decades. It has been a great honor.
We are blessed to have raised our families here and watch yours grow with us. Together, we have celebrated more birthdays, wedding anniversaries, date nights, and Christmas Eve with our Jewish friends than we can count. These are special moments deserving of a well-cooked meal shared around a table with the people you love and want to spend quality time with.
We have served you hot bowls of wonton soup when you were sick, a late night lo-mein after your double shift, a rack of spare ribs after a devastating Sixers loss, and many more moments when a hot satisfying meal is the only comfort needed so we can go to bed and wake up to do it all over again.
It is a part we have played to the best of our ability and we are beyond grateful for the opportunity.
In many ways, we are a product of the American Dream. We are an immigrant family that fled Vietnam during the war and was fortunately sponsored by a church in Conshohocken. When we first arrived in the United States, we didn’t know the English language, had never seen snow, and didn’t know the customs. We initially worked as seamstresses in a factory down the street from the restaurant and sold produce out of a van. We lived on Hector Street with three families in a single townhouse. We worked together to save enough money to open up a business of our own, something we left in Vietnam.
After three years of saving, and working together, we opened the Golden Dragon and our dream came true. The Golden Dragon has anchored us in the community. We bought homes a mile away and had all our children work at the restaurant. When they were much younger, we had them work on their studies in the booths while you had a meal with us. They all graduated from Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and moved on to higher education institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, Villanova University, Drexel University, and Johns Hopkins University. Our children have gone on to create a life for themselves, they have been able to fulfill their own dreams.
Although the Golden Dragon is closing, the Dream is alive. We are taking a much-deserved break and will play with our grandkids, venture back to Vietnam to visit our family and binge-watch a large catalog of back-logged shows. Upon our return back to the United States, we will figure out how to pass the time when we are not pouring boxes of snow peas to be snapped or string beans waiting to be cut for your next meal or folding wontons while catching up on our family updates. Any ideas are welcome as these habits will be hard to break.
Thank you for making us a part of your lives, at your dining table and ours, for all these decades.
多謝
With Love and Gratitude,
The Golden Dragon Family
(The Long, Le, Ly, and Hua families)
