Open since 1985, Imperial Chinese is among the city’s oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurants — but now its run has ended. “After many years at Imperial Chinese we have made the difficult decision to close our doors. Due to rising operating costs and ongoing economic challenges, this was not an easy decision,” reads a note left on the door of the restaurant at 421 South Broadway.
The news comes after a 2023 change in ownership of the business founded by Johnny Hsu. In 1979, Hsu immigrated to Denver from Hong Kong, where he had attended culinary school. “I learned all kinds of cooking there: Cantonese, Szechuan, barbecue, even French cooking,” he told Westword in 2011. “I knew I was going to work in the restaurants in America.”
It wasn’t long before Hsu made the jump from restaurant employee to owner when, in 1980, he and his sister took over a flailing Chinese restaurant in the Tech Center, renaming it Jade Garden. Hsu ran that for five years, until he was approached with the opportunity to open a place of his own. In 1985, he debuted the original Imperial Chinese at 1 Broadway. It operated at that address for a decade before moving further south on Broadway, where it was a mainstay for almost thirty years for fans of Chinese American food.
But in 2023, Hsu quietly passed the torch to Dan Dietrich, who formed Imperial Restaurant Group to accommodate his vision; the next year, Dietrich purchased four locations of the shuttered conveyor belt sushi concept Sushi-Rama. According to a February 2025 Denver Post story, Dietrich’s plan was to turn the locations in Broomfield, the DTC, Aurora and Lone Tree into outposts of Imperial Go, a fast-casual offshoot of the original full-service restaurant…