After three decades in the restaurant business, the owners of U Garden Chinese Restaurant on University Avenue are closing their doors at the end of the month.
The Ung family’s Chinese buffet and event center has hosted hundreds of wedding dinners and other celebrations since it opened 32 years ago. Its location near the University of Minnesota is also a go-to spot for many students and workers.
Co-owner Huy Ung said his phone hadn’t stopped ringing since his family posted the announcement earlier this week.
“They message and call me directly asking why,” he said, tearing up.
The business will be closing permanently at the end of their last day on May 31.
Ung cited burnout and a desire to spend more time with his family as the leading reason why the restaurant is closing.
His parents first opened a Chinese restaurant in Robbinsdale before expanding to the University Avenue site. They later consolidated to the Minneapolis location, just outside Stadium Village. In a Facebook post announcing the closure, the family noted that U Garden succeeded in a space where many other restaurants had failed.
But now the family has made the decision to close their business.
“I just burned out myself. It’s been here too long and too many hours,” Ung said.
Huy’s brother Spencer Ung, a co-owner and manager, said Tuesday’s announcement felt like “it was the end of an era.”
“I guess everyone’s in shock and we’re trying to go through the phase as well,” he said.
The restaurant on University Avenue is popular for their buffet options like fried chicken wings, dumplings, sesame chicken and whole walleye.
The day after his Facebook announcement, Huy Ung also printed a notice and taped it to the front door.
“What? This is crazy,” Mars Henry Howard said to Huy Ung when he stopped in Wednesday.
Howard works nearby and has eaten at U Garden almost every weekday for the last three months. He said the restaurant’s fried rice has become his go-to dish.
“I went to the U Garden once, tried out their stuff, fell in love with it and have been here ever since,” he said.
Restaurant regulars like Howard are who Spencer and Huy Ung said they’d miss the most.
“We really appreciate them coming here, some making long trips on a consistent basis, we’re going to miss seeing them, all the customers,” Spencer Ung said.
Former U employee Eileen Schlentz was another one of those customers. She said she’s been a regular customer at U Garden since the late 1990s.
She’s seen the restaurant transform over the years. She remembers a point in time when the lunch buffet even included shrimp.
“I imagine with the price of shrimp, where it is, that’s why they haven’t been putting it out,” Schlentz said.
According to her, other than the food, she’s going to miss the friendly nature of the staff the most. Schlentz said they always remembered the small things, like not putting ice in her water.
She’s one of several customers that started coming back to the restaurant after hearing it was closing.
Since the Facebook post went up announcing the restaurant’s closure, more than a dozen people have commented, most of them expressing gratitude to the family who ran the business.
“I’m going to miss this place dreadfully. I’m going to miss the guys and the waitresses,” Schlentz said. “I’m going to miss everybody here, and I hope whatever comes in here is at least half as good.”
During her last trip, Schlentz also said she was going to attempt to save some of the recipes for the building’s upcoming owners.
“I was going to tell the manager, would he please give his hot sour soup recipe to the new guys? There’s going to be a new restaurant coming in, and I would like them to make good soup too,” Schlentz said.
The two brothers said the future is uncertain for the family, but what’s certain is that they’re overdue for a break.
The Ung family has been in the restaurant business for more than three decades, beginning with a restaurant in Robbinsdale before they expanded to their current location on University Avenue in Minneapolis.
The U Garden restaurant and event center eventually became their only business.
Huy Ung said he works 12 hours a day, every day at the restaurant. At his age, he said it’s not sustainable.
The space is not only used as a restaurant, but regularly used for social gatherings like weddings and birthdays. Spencer Ung said they’ll be busy up until they have to close on May 31.
According to him, there’s even a prom for a small St. Paul high school scheduled the day before they close.
Huy Ung said he’s contemplated leaving the restaurant business for years, but the customers are what’s kept him from stepping away. Now that the announcement is out, he said he has mixed emotions.
“Now I just want to get out [of] here, enjoy, spend some time with family more, and we’ll do something else different,” he said.
Future of location
The restaurant was almost sold three years ago, when developers pitched an apartment complex on the site that would have razed the current buildings on the site. But those plans were scrapped by the Minneapolis Planning Commission for not meeting the city’s height requirements, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal reported.
The Ungs, through 4Tech LLC, bought the property in 2003 for $260,000, according to Hennepin County property records.
The property’s value as of 2025 is $1.879 million, according to county documents.
Spencer Ung said the family is not selling the space but has reached a deal to lease it to a new tenant.
He said the family is leasing their restaurant to owners who plan to convert it into a Korean barbecue and hot pot restaurant that could open by the end of the year.
Correction: A previous version of this story had incorrect information about the future ownership of the U Garden space.
Sahan Journal videographer Dymanh Chhoun contributed to this story.
