Plaza shops — Great Wall Bookstore, T&T Ginseng, Diamond Bakery, Lohan School of Shaolin

Before we leave the plaza, slow down at the smaller doorways — because this is the part people miss when they come here just to eat. A community needs more than dinner, and here's the proof of it, tucked around this courtyard.

Start with the bookshop: Great Wall Bookstore, which opened right along with the plaza back in the nineties and is one of the only Chinese-language bookstores in all of Nevada. Thirty years of newspapers, textbooks, calendars, DVDs — a place to read and stay literate in your first language, a thousand miles from a bigger Chinatown. Near it, an herbalist, T&T Ginseng, with its walls of dried roots and teas and remedies — traditional Chinese medicine, still practiced, still stocked. And a Hong Kong-style bakery, Diamond, where the barbecue-pork buns and egg tarts come out warm.

Now look up, to the second floor. Since 1994 — and notice that date, it's a year before the plaza itself opened — there's been a Shaolin kung-fu school up there, the Lohan School. It teaches the valley's kids their Kung Fu and Tai Chi, and it trains the lion-dance teams you'll see leaping through this courtyard every Lunar New Year.

Bookshop, herbalist, bakery, martial-arts hall. This is the quiet answer to a place that gets written up only for its restaurants: a real community built the ordinary machinery of a life here — reading, healing, baking, teaching — around one grocery store.