Chinatown Is Closing Faster Than the Rest of Las Vegas

We track 1,897 established restaurants across the Las Vegas valley. We check them on a schedule, because a guide that recommends a closed restaurant is worse than no guide at all.

Fifty-nine of them closed this year.

That number is not the interesting part. The interesting part is where they were.

The corridor lost the most

Spring Mountain Road carries the densest concentration of restaurants we track anywhere in the valley: 150 of them along the stretch running west from Decatur. Eleven closed. That is a rate of 7.3 percent, against 2.8 percent for every other part of the valley we monitor. The gap is large enough that it is not noise (p = 0.005).

Sort by category instead of by street and the same pattern appears from a different direction. Asian restaurants in our panel closed at 5.9 percent. Everything else closed at 2.1 percent. That is nearly three times the rate, and it is the single strongest signal in the data (p = 0.0002).

Those two findings are mostly the same finding. Spring Mountain is pan-Asian, and it is where the closures landed.

They were not failing restaurants

The reflex is to assume the places that closed were the weak ones. The record does not support that reading.

Of the fifty-nine, 44 percent held a rating of 4.5 or better. 83 percent were at 4.0 or better. On Spring Mountain the list reads like a recommendation column: Souperb Wagyu Hot Pot at 4.9, Bobae Noodle House at 4.8, Shigotonin at 4.7, and Mr BBQ, Noodle Nest, Sinh Sinh and Doya Jjambbong all at 4.5.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a column like this usually overreaches. The closed restaurants carry a median rating of 4.4 and the survivors carry 4.2. That difference is not statistically significant, and I am not going to tell you that being good is what killed them. What the data supports is narrower and still worth saying plainly: the closures were not concentrated among bad restaurants. Whatever sorted these rooms into closing and staying open, it was not the quality of the food.

What did separate them

One variable does separate the two groups cleanly, and it is size.

The restaurants that closed carry a median of 198 reviews. The ones still open carry 370. The closures were, in the most literal sense, close to half the size of the survivors (p = 0.022). Not worse. Smaller.

That is the shape of a room that is doing fine on a Friday and has no cushion for a bad quarter. It is also the shape of most of Spring Mountain, where the operating model is a small owner-operated dining room with one location and no second site to carry it.

Price tells the same story from the other end. Nothing in the $$$$ tier closed. Not one room, out of the 81 we track at that level.

What this does not tell us

We know where the closures happened and roughly what the closed rooms had in common. We do not know why, and I am not going to guess at rent, lease terms, or tourism mix, because we did not report that out. This is what a monitored list of restaurants can tell you and no more.

We also do not track every restaurant in Las Vegas. Our panel is 1,897 established, well-reviewed rooms. The rates above are rates within that group, not across the whole valley. A comprehensive census would likely show a higher closure rate, because it would include the thin, new and under-reviewed places we never published in the first place.

Two notes on method, because both changed the number.

We flagged 66 closures. Re-checking every one against Yelp found three that had been flagged in error and are open today: Aroma Latin American Cocina and Two Sisters Broasted Chicken & Ribs in Henderson, and Le Umu in Las Vegas. Those three are corrected in our data and are not counted here.

Then we checked the harder question: did any of the rest simply move? A delisted listing looks identical whether a restaurant shut down or reopened across town under a new one. So we searched every remaining name against live listings across the valley. That removed four more. The Poke Shack & Grill did not close, it relocated to Fremont Street. Nona’s was replaced at the same address by Nona’s Lobster Shack. Pablo’s Kitchen is a food truck with no fixed address, now trading as a caterer. And “Asia @ Bally’s” carried a single review and the name of a casino that stopped existing in 2022, which makes it a stale listing rather than a room. Fifty-nine survive both checks.

One thing the list does not mean. Five of the fifty-nine are branch closures of businesses still trading elsewhere in the valley: JINYA Ramen Bar on Flamingo, El Dorado Cantina at Tivoli Village, the Egg Works on South Rainbow, Blue Ribbon on the Strip, and the Baguette Cafe on South Eastern. Those locations closed. The businesses did not. If you know one of these is still open somewhere else, you are right, and that is why they are named here rather than buried in a count.

A closure list nobody re-checks is a rumor with a spreadsheet attached.

The list

All 59, with the rating and review count each carried when it closed. Click any column to sort.