This one's kind of a bummer. Tri-Village Northern Chinese Cuisine, which at one time served one of the better Peking ducks in our fair county and the recipient of many honors we've bestowed (including the Best Chinese Restaurant in our 2011 Best Of Issue), has finally shuttered.
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It was dark for a few months, but now its demise is official as The Irvine Company, its landlord, has blackened out the windows and put up new signs announcing that a Korean soup restaurant called Tang 190 is taking over the space.
The original owners of Tri-Village actually sold the place years ago and started Asian Tapas in another neighborhood in Irvine (which coincidentally is also under new ownership these days). There was word that when it closed, it might have been under its third set of owners. But the Peking duck at Tri-Village and the duck bone soup that came after was exemplary when I had it last, even better than the Peking duck I tried at a SGV restaurant that was supposedly the best at it in L.A.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.