After 40 years and 1 million wontons, Golden Dragon restaurant near Conshohocken will close

After living their American dream for four decades, Lang Vuong and her large, extended family will begin a new chapter next month: retirement.

Golden Dragon — the Chinese restaurant near Conshohocken that the Vietnamese émigrés opened in 1982 — will close. Most of Plymouth Square Shopping Center, at Butler and Ridge Pikes, is being renovated, and the family had been granted extensions for the last few years.

Sept. 16 will be Golden Dragon’s last day.

After deciding to close rather than relocate, the family has begun reaching out to customers. “You have kept us in business through 10 presidencies, two recessions, eight blizzards, one Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl championship, and a global pandemic,” they wrote in a note.

Asked who of the dozens of siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles from the Long, Le, Ly, and Hua families have worked at Golden Dragon, Vuong’s granddaughter Jennifer Hua smiled and said: “All of us.”

“For all seven grandchildren, it was our hangout,” her brother, David Hua, said. “We did it all. There was no summer camp. Our weekends were spent at the restaurant, helping out and serving food, washing dishes, prepping, breaking down boxes, hosting, waitering, taking orders over the phone.” They did their homework in the booths. Most of the kids went to Plymouth Whitemarsh High and attended such universities as Penn, Penn State, Villanova, Drexel, and Johns Hopkins.

Some, like the Huas’ mother, Susan, still work at the restaurant, while others have gone on to other careers.

David Hua, 39, lives in San Francisco and is cofounder and chief executive of Meadow, which creates point-of-sales systems for the cannabis industry.

“The families have raised their own families there,” said Jennifer Hua, 37, who lives in Washington and is a college administrator.

The family’s journey to America began in 1979. Seeing hostilities at home in Vietnam four years after the war ended, Vuong, husband Henry Long, and their three daughters and spouses sold their belongings and left by boat. They stopped in Malaysia.

American church groups were sponsoring Vietnamese refugees for relocation in the United States. The Longs’ sponsor, Spring Mill Baptist Church in Conshohocken, helped them find work. The women, who arrived first, sewed clothing in a local factory. Most of the men sold produce and worked in construction. One waited tables in a Chinese restaurant.

The family shared a townhouse in Conshohocken. After three years, “we pulled up enough money finally to open up a business,” said Jennifer Hua.

“This was truly their American dream.”

They decided that it would be a restaurant. Long, the patriarch (who died about 20 years ago), was a dishwasher at the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City, and there he met a chef who knew how to cook Chinese food. The chef designed the kitchen and created the recipes still used at Golden Dragon.

Golden Dragon always served American Chinese food because the family is ethnically Chinese, Jennifer Hua said. Besides, in 1982, Vietnamese restaurants were rare in the Philadelphia suburbs.

The menu selections are typical of many suburban strip-mall spots. The food is made from scratch. The modest dining room is simply adorned with lanterns and carvings.

“This was truly their American dream,” Jennifer Hua said.

The family members — many of whom still live in the Conshohocken house — are coming to grips with the closing. “We keep thinking about what Mommy [Susan] is going to do to make her life meaningful,” Jennifer Hua said. “While the restaurant is a place, it’s part of the family. When I have a conversation with my mom, the first question I ask is, ‘How is it going at the restaurant?’ If someone wants to go on vacation, it’s not, ‘Where are you going?’ It’s, ‘Who’s going to work at the restaurant?’”

Vuong, the matriarch, turning to her granddaughter to interpret said: “To say there are no emotions or feelings with the restaurant closing would be a lie. I am still processing those feelings. We are so extremely grateful for the customer base that we’ve had come to the restaurant and support us, to be able to raise our families where now they can live their own dreams. But now it’s our time to take a rest.”