Flashback Friday: Wichita Chinese restaurant that opened in 1990 was the last of its kind

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives. This week’s featured restaurant, Kwan Court, operated on Rock Road from 1990 until 2011.

It’s been gone for nearly 13 years, but it was one of Wichita’s best Asian restaurants. It was one of the places Wichita learned to eat sushi. And it might have been the last of its kind — a nice, modern sit-down Chinese restaurant that drew people not only for its always-fresh lunch buffet but also for its regular menu of Chinese and Japanese specialties.

Kwan Court opened in 1990 at 1443 N. Rock Road, taking over a building that for years had been home to ’70s and ’80s hot spots like Charlie Brown’s and The Hatch. Its founder, Quan Diec, already owned three Kwan Wah restaurants in town but wanted to start a restaurant that focused on seafood.

Kwan Court lasted until 2011, when a Wichita-in-mourning said goodbye, but the restaurant made its mark on the city, and even though its former building is now occupied by a dental office, many who drive past it still glance over and remember the window full of lush plants, the 1990s peach-and-pink carpet, the white grand piano in the dining room, and the peel-and-eat shrimp on the salad bar.

When Diec first opened the restaurant, he tried to erase its “fern bar” past by completely redecorating the building — eliminating its sunken lounge and wood-burning fireplace and turning the bar into a sushi bar. In advertisements he ran in the local papers in the early days, he’d tout the restaurant’s seafood offerings — especially its Main lobster — and invite people to come give sushi a try.

Wichita Eagle restaurant critic Diane Lewis was impressed when she visited Kwan Court in October 1990, saying that its menu “defies characterization.” Thanks to Diec’s willingness to wade into the bi-coastal trend of fusion food — something long overdue in the Midwest — “Wichita is on its way,” she wrote.

As the years went on, Rock Road became the place that Wichitans went to dine out, and Kwan Court thrived. It sometimes even got visits from celebrities who were in town, including actors Glenn Close and Christopher Walken, whose autographed photos hung for years on a wall in the restaurant entrance.

In 2006, founder Diec sold the restaurant to employee Kong Wong, who gave the restaurant a face left in 2009. Wong kept Kwan Court going, but by 2011, he was facing financial issues and filed for bankruptcy. Wichita was bereft. He announced he’d close the Kwan Court on Sept. 18 of that year but encouraged people to email him their memories of the restaurant.

Yen Ching, another upscale Chinese restaurant on Rock Road, closed three years later, and now, most Chinese food purveyors in Wichita are either super buffets or to-go restaurants. Now, with Ming’s at 1625 S. Seneca about to close, the number of sit-down Chinese restaurants in Wichita continues to dwindle.