The Largest and Most Magnicient Chinese Restaurant in the World

1974 Matchbook, courtesy of my collection

My earliest, albeit faint, memory of the Zorba the Greek Restaurant stems back to 1998 when a birthday party was held in one of the vast banquet rooms of the restaurant. It was lively with dancing, music, lots of food and people having a good time. Now you may be wondering why the title and body of this post are conflicting with the mention of both a Chinese and Greek Restaurant, we'll go back to the early 1960s for a brief bit to understand why.

1963 Matchbook, courtesy City of San Jose Historical Report

In 1961, Dick Yee (then owner of the multi-chain Dick's Supermarket) planned to open a Chinese Restaurant named Dick's Dragon in the same center as the supermarket along Bascom Avenue. It opened in 1963 and was marketed as "The Largest and Most Magnificent Chinese Restaurant in the World" complete with a sunken bar playing organ music, gardens, gift shop and a Pagoda. However, it was all very short lived and by 1966 Dick's Dragon was purchased by Nick and Pete Kouretas and it was subsequently remodeled to remove the Chinese theming to reopen the place as Zorba the Greek. 

Among the earliest photo I took of Zorba the Greek (Late 2009)

Zorba the Greek had a long run in San Jose, hosting countless events from weddings to birthdays in addition to providing entertainment and food over three decades. However, all good things come to an end at some point and Zorba had it's last guests in 1999; when the restaurant was shuttered for good. I would venture over to photograph the place often, documenting it's exterior decay and wanting to explore the interior of the place but to no avail for many years. The place was locked up tighter than a fort, complete with barbed wire along all the fences and thick metal chains on the front door.

Naturally, the property with Zorba was sold by the Yee family to a developer who plans to build a high rise office and residential complex in it's place. Knowing it's days were numbered, I planned do one final set of photos of the place. Driving by it the day prior, I see the front doors were wide open and knew I had to act soon on it. 11 years after I first photographed the place I had made it inside and to the very banquet room that we had the party in almost 22 years ago.


Most of the restaurant was left the way it was the day it shuttered, aside from what was moved and damaged by scrapers and vandals. Chairs, booth seats, the bar and even a few dishes still remained stacked in the kitchen. It was a surreal explore and one I won't forget, walking among the now eerily silent halls of what was a vibrant, bustling restaurant.

More photos can be found here of Zorba the Greek.

How it all Began

Around 2009, I had gotten my first camera that was a step up from a point and shoot, not quite a D-SLR, but it had many of the functions of a D-SLR camera. I had also enrolled in photography classes in college and was finding my way with what subjects to photograph.

One day after class at San Jose State University,  I was driving around the outskirts of Downtown and saw this boarded up church along a busy stretch of Delmas Street. I parked and began to take some photos of the church from the street side and along the sidewalk.

There also happened to be some workers within the property, working to secure the building with boards. They saw me taking photos of the church through the fence and began talking to me. I was invited inside the property to be able to take better photos of the church from the other side of the fence while they worked to board up and secure the buildings. I was unable to go inside the church but it was still good to have been able to have gotten these exterior photographs.

The church was supposed to be relocated on the property and redone as part of a then proposed residential project to be built on most of the property. I was grateful to have had the opportunity to go into this property and be able to photograph it as it was at the time. These are among the earliest photographs I had taken of an abandoned building and all these years later they still echo with me as this is what started my interest in abandoned places in San Jose and surrounding areas.

They also served as documentation of not only an abandoned place that many did not pay much attention to but of places that I would soon learn disappeared almost as fast as they went abandoned over the course of my photography around San Jose. In the early morning hours of March 2010, the very church I had photographed in December 2009 caught fire, destroying the entire structure as seen at right. The burnt out remains sat for a few months before the building was cleared and the property has since sat to this day as a open field, only living on through the photos I had taken.