David Lee dies at 95; ran popular General Lee’s restaurant in Chinatown

Sugar, sesame, soy and sherry wine — mild ingredients for a mild chef.

For David Lee, they were the basics of his crowd-pleasing menu at General Lee’s, a kind of Chinatown Brown Derby frequented in its heyday by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

Lee’s personal style was as mild as he claimed Chinese cooking was supposed to be. “No group has had it easy,” the lifelong restaurateur would say, when asked of the prejudice Chinese Americans faced in his childhood.

Where others saw conflict, Lee saw prospects, as when the U.S. normalized relations with China. And when his family restaurant finally fell out of fashion, Lee was characteristically practical. “There was no use to fight,” he said.

David Fon Lee, 95, died in his Los Feliz home Dec. 1 of natural causes more than a century after his grandfather first opened the cafe that would become one of the city’s most renowned eateries.

As a child in the 1930s, Lee chopped onions in the kitchen of the family business, already in its second generation. He went on with his brothers to run the establishment on Gin Ling Road off North Hill Street in its glory days in the 1940s and ‘50s; his nephew would eventually join them.

Once considered the fanciest Chinese restaurant in town, it lost its customer base in later decades.

But its decor was so iconic that “General Lee’s Banquet Room” was a featured installation in a New York museum exhibit two decades after it closed, and a nostalgic revival of the old haunt has remerged in the same location.

Lee, meanwhile, went into the travel agency business and became a well-known Chinatown booster, civic leader and promoter of Chinese American business interests.

He mingled with international envoys, mayors and Olympic athletes. But he never lost his cook’s sensibilities — “born in the aprons,” as he once told a Times reporter. “He was just this person who had no judgment about anybody,” said his daughter Sharon Lee of Los Feliz, a kindergarten teacher.

Lee was born Jan. 17, 1920, one of 11 children of Lee Fon and Lum See. Lee’s Cantonese grandfather Lee Woo Hoy started a restaurant called Man Jen Low in L.A.’s old Chinatown, which was moved when Union Station was built. David Lee grew up there. Just after his 10th birthday, his family sent him to China where he attended boarding school. He returned to L.A. to receive his diploma at Lincoln High School.

He served in the U.S. Navy during World War ll. By then, the family restaurant had been moved to a new location off Hill Street. Lee returned from the war to work for his parents. According to his daughter, he worked seven years without a break. Early on, the restaurant name was changed to General Lee’s at the suggestion of a Times reporter.

Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, Spencer Tracy and Liza Minnelli were among the luminaries Lee recalled serving. The restaurant also drew customers from the Civic Center, and Lee became acquainted with prominent lawyers and politicians, including Mayor Tom Bradley. As co-owner of General Lee’s, Lee was president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the 1970s. He was liaison to Chinese athletes during the 1984 Summer Olympics, organizer of Chinese New Year events and a founder of the Guangzhou Sister City Assn.

General Lee’s persisted through Chinatown’s ups and downs. The neighborhood had never been quite what it seemed. The San Gabriel Valley outshined it as a Chinese American cultural center even in the 1970s. Parking was a problem. The restaurant went the way of the Brown Derby in the late 1980s, though Lee kept the building in the family.

When younger non-Chinese operators sought to reopen it years later, capitalizing on nostalgic appeal, Lee enthusiastically backed them. Today, General Lee’s has reappeared in the form of a downtown bar and art space with many of its historic trappings, said Lee’s daughter. “It got a little hipster-ized,” she said.

Or rather, “Clifton-ized,” she said, in reference to the restored downtown cafeteria on Broadway.

Besides his daughter, Lee is survived by his wife, Yukie Lee, and two grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son David Lee Jr., who died at 19 in a car accident in 1988, and by stepson Steven Sasaki.

jill.leovy@latimes.com

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