Kung Fu Plaza corner
The corridor's oldest business — which chose this corner in 1993, two years before there was a Chinatown to join.
Key facts
- By the family's own account, Kung Fu Thai & Chinese began in 1973 at 3rd & Fremont downtown, moved inside the Union Plaza casino in 1983, and relocated to this Valley View corner in 1993 — two years before Chinatown Plaza opened. (Self-reported dates; no independent contemporaneous source confirms them.)
- Often described as the oldest Thai-and-Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas, still open in 2026.
- Bridges to downtown's real Chinese century: Ying Lee's 1905 laundry and 1908 stake in the Arrowhead Restaurant on Fremont; the Fong family's all-electric 24-hour Silver Café (1933); Wing Fong's Fong's Garden (1955), an attempt to seed a downtown Chinatown that never took.
- Chinatown Plaza opened in February 1995, not 1993 as some listings claim — which is what makes this restaurant's 1993 arrival a genuine pre-plaza fact.
Narration transcript
Look at the restaurant on this corner. Nothing about it shouts “historic” — but by the family's own telling, this is the oldest business on the entire corridor, and its story rewrites the one we started with.
The family says it began back in 1973, downtown, at Third and Fremont. Then in 1983 they opened inside the old Union Plaza casino. And then, in 1993, they moved out here, to this corner of Valley View and Spring Mountain. Hold onto that year — 1993 — because Chinatown Plaza, the gate we started at, didn't open until February 1995. So the corridor's oldest restaurant chose this spot two years before there was a Chinatown here to join. It didn't follow the plaza. It got here first.
And that points to the real secret under the made-to-order story. The Chinese history of Las Vegas is old — much older than this street. It just happened somewhere else. Two miles east, downtown, Chinese Las Vegans were here from the very beginning: a man named Ying Lee ran a laundry on Fremont Street back in 1905 and bought into a restaurant there in 1908. The Fong family ran an all-electric, all-night café at First and Fremont in the 1930s. In 1955 Wing Fong even tried to start a downtown Chinatown with a restaurant garden — and it never took hold. The Chinatown that history would have predicted, downtown, never happened. The one you're standing in was built from scratch, out here, decades later. That's the gap this whole tour lives in.