Chinese Staple Abruptly Closes After More Than Forty Years

Open since 1985, Imperial Chinese is among the city’s oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurants — but now its run has ended. “After many years at Imperial Chinese we have made the difficult decision to close our doors. Due to rising operating costs and ongoing economic challenges, this was not an easy decision,” reads a note left on the door of the restaurant at 421 South Broadway.

The news comes after a 2023 change in ownership of the business founded by Johnny Hsu. In 1979, Hsu immigrated to Denver from Hong Kong, where he had attended culinary school. “I learned all kinds of cooking there: Cantonese, Szechuan, barbecue, even French cooking,” he told Westword in 2011. “I knew I was going to work in the restaurants in America.”

It wasn’t long before Hsu made the jump from restaurant employee to owner when, in 1980, he and his sister took over a flailing Chinese restaurant in the Tech Center, renaming it Jade Garden. Hsu ran that for five years, until he was approached with the opportunity to open a place of his own. In 1985, he debuted the original Imperial Chinese at 1 Broadway. It operated at that address for a decade before moving further south on Broadway, where it was a mainstay for almost thirty years for fans of Chinese American food.

But in 2023, Hsu quietly passed the torch to Dan Dietrich, who formed Imperial Restaurant Group to accommodate his vision; the next year, Dietrich purchased four locations of the shuttered conveyor belt sushi concept Sushi-Rama. According to a February 2025 Denver Post story, Dietrich’s plan was to turn the locations in Broomfield, the DTC, Aurora and Lone Tree into outposts of Imperial Go, a fast-casual offshoot of the original full-service restaurant.

Imperial Restaurant Group’s parent company is listed as Jogan Companies Inc, which Dietrich founded in 2021. His LinkedIn profile shows a laundry list of over fifteen businesses currently operating under his leadership as CEO, including Donut Haus, with locations in Loveland and Estes Park; Bristlecone Inn in Estes Park; a Las Vegas-based AI company; and an asphalt and concrete maintenance services company based in Lafayette.

Missing from that list is Jogan Health LLC, another company owned by Dietrich that was the subject of a 2022 investigation by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment as well as a Denver7 investigation that same year. According to the Post‘s 2025 story, “Dietrich disputes claims made in the report and in December 2022 filed a lawsuit against the station and the reporter for defamation.” That case was dismissed.

In the meantime, however, none of the Imperial Go spots ever appeared. And now the Imperial itself is gone, with no explanation beyond the sign on the door of the Broadway eatery. The owner has not responded to requests for comment.

At the Belleview Station address that was supposed to become an Imperial Go location, “coming soon” signage still hangs in the window, but the QR code on the graphic links to imperialchinesekitchen.com, a website that no longer exists.

It’s an abrupt, mysterious and sad ending for a restaurant that served many guests over the decades.