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1986 — present
Two kitchens, two migrations: China Palace, on Bluffton Road, is the Fort Wayne restaurant of Yung Phan and Kim Trinh, Vietnamese immigrants who met in Fort Wayne after Trinh had worked in restaurants across the country; the menu he built from that experience became, on Fort Wayne Magazine's account, one of the most popular east Asian menus in the city, and the magazine's measure of the place is its regulars — a customer who ate lunch there every working day of his life and still comes every Friday in retirement. RMY's Restaurant, on Wayne Trace, carries the other migration: Yolanda Johnson and her mother Maggie Fuqua have run it since 1986 on recipes from the family's Alabama years — fried chicken, candied yams, collard greens, peach cobbler — handed down, in Yolanda's words, from "the women who came before." The restaurant closed when Yolanda moved her mother to Indianapolis for cancer treatment; Maggie beat the cancer, and RMY's reopened on the only terms the family could sustain — five hours a week, 1 to 6 p.m. on Sundays, busy for all five.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Magazine / FortWayne.com, "The Family Way" — China Palace's owners, their meeting in Fort Wayne, and the regulars; RMY's 1986 opening, the Alabama recipes, the closing and the Sunday-only reopening.
- Communities — the Vietnamese and Black communities as peoples, cross-referenced and not retold here.