Why Peking Tavern matters.
Peking Tavern is a convivial Chinese gastropub where Little Tokyo's cross-cultural dining scene meets Andrew Chiu and Andrew Wong's memories of 1990s Beijing, handmade northern Chinese food and a bar program built around baijiu.
Set along South Los Angeles Street near East 2nd Street and just south of Japanese Village Plaza, the restaurant occupies Little Tokyo's southern edge between the Historic Core, Arts District and civic buildings extending north toward the neighborhood's long-established commercial center. A broad patio fronts the contemporary ground-floor location, replacing the hidden descent that defined the restaurant's original Downtown incarnation with a substantially more visible relationship to the street. The dining room carries communal seating toward an open kitchen, making dumpling preparation part of the principal visual field. Industrial surfaces and restrained Chinese references preserve some of the informality of the earlier tavern. The result is a street-level gastropub whose patio, communal tables and exposed kitchen recast Peking Tavern's original underground intimacy for a brighter Little Tokyo setting.
What defines Peking Tavern.
Peking Tavern is best known for translating Andrew Chiu and Andrew Wong's experiences in 1990s Beijing into a Chinese gastropub conceived years before that format had an established place in Downtown. Both founders trained as architects and practiced in Asia, repeatedly meeting in Beijing during a period when neighborhood restaurants preserved regional cooking traditions even as rapid redevelopment began erasing portions of the city they remembered. Chiu spent six years in the Chinese capital; his mother and wife were both raised there, and Wong came from a family of Chinese restaurateurs. The pair eventually formed hospitality and design practice El Guapo Group, then began pitching their restaurant idea 2011 despite skepticism surrounding the combination of Chinese food, cocktails and Downtown. Their first restaurant opened beneath the National City Tower in 2013, with Chiu and Wong designing its gray-brick walls and communal arrangement around memories of Beijing hutongs and older American Chinatowns. Cari Hah, whose Los Angeles résumé included The Varnish and Neat, developed the original cocktail program, and the founders commissioned her a year before opening to find ways of incorporating Beijing's Erguotou baijiu into mixed drinks. Executive chef Yumei Liu oversaw handmade dumplings, and veteran Mr. Chow pasta chef Danny Yip came out of retirement to pull noodles in an exhibition kitchen. Sichuan Fish Dumplings subsequently won a televised cooking competition and remained one of the restaurant's signatures. The original basement closed in October 2022 after nearly a decade, yet Chiu and Wong revived Peking Tavern in 2023 inside the former Seoul Sausage space in Little Tokyo, shifting a concept born from memories of disappearing Beijing neighborhoods into a second Los Angeles chapter.
Northern Chinese dough work remains the culinary foundation, with individual dumplings made on the premises and rice and stir-fry deliberately absent from the founders' original conception. Pork dumplings wrap cabbage and seasoned pork inside boiled dough, placing the emphasis on the wrapper and filling. Seafood dumplings combine shrimp, scallop and egg, shifting the same handmade format toward a softer marine filling. Sichuan Fish Dumplings use swai and basil before entering red chile oil and garlic sauce, giving one of the restaurant's most recognized preparations a markedly different heat and texture profile. Slow-braised beef shank supplies both beef noodle soup and the scallion beef roll, where slices of meat, cilantro, green onion and a sweet-savory sauce are enclosed in a crisp pancake. Baijiu provides the corresponding drinking tradition: Peking Tavern has carried multiple expressions of the Chinese grain spirit for neat, chilled and cocktail service, with the Wong Chiu Punch combining baijiu, hibiscus and fresh lemon and Peking Coffee joining the spirit with coffee and horchata liqueur. The pairing of handmade wheat-based food with China's dominant distilled spirit preserves the founders' original idea of treating northern Chinese tavern drinking and eating as parts of the same social ritual.
How Peking Tavern fits.
Peking Tavern works as the anchor for a Little Tokyo outing connecting Japanese American religious institution-building, the neighborhood's wartime rupture and an artist-run movement that transformed inexpensive Downtown space into a center for contemporary art.
Begin at Koyasan Buddhist Temple, whose Los Angeles congregation traces to 1912 and the establishment of a Shingon Buddhist mission serving the city's growing Japanese immigrant population. The institution moved through several locations before establishing its Little Tokyo temple, developing religious observances alongside language instruction, youth activities and community functions. World War II fractured that continuity when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the West Coast, and the temple temporarily ceased its ordinary neighborhood role during incarceration. Its postwar revival restored a religious institution whose history crosses Little Tokyo's prewar growth, forced displacement and reconstruction. Continue to Japanese American National Museum, incorporated in 1985 by community figures seeking a permanent institution for Japanese American history and opened in 1992 inside the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. That 1925 building had served one of Little Tokyo's major congregations before wartime incarceration emptied the neighborhood and later became part of the museum's historical campus. JANM subsequently expanded into a pavilion designed by Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, creating a physical connection between a surviving prewar religious structure and a purpose-built national museum. Its collections encompass photographs, documents, artworks and objects extending across immigration, incarceration, military service and postwar life. Conclude at LA Artcore, founded by Lydia Takeshita in 1979 as an artist-centered nonprofit devoted to contemporary exhibitions and cross-cultural exchange. The organization became part of the Downtown arts movement that took advantage of inexpensive industrial and commercial spaces as artists established communities east of Little Tokyo. Its long presence around the neighborhood connected local exhibition culture with international artists, particularly through exchanges involving Japan and other parts of Asia. The progression moves from a Buddhist congregation formed during Japanese immigration through an institution preserving the consequences of wartime incarceration and culminates in the artist-run culture that helped extend Little Tokyo's creative geography toward the Arts District.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte Travel may earn a commission when you book through the link on this page.
