Owner of 30-year-old SF Chinese restaurant selling business

After 30 years on the corner of 24th and Mission streets, the owner of China Express & Donuts is looking to retire. Jolly Chan, who first opened the Chinese restaurant and doughnut shop in 1993, told SFGATE that he has put the business up for sale. 

“After 30 years, I’m burned out,” Chan said. He said he has been looking for a buyer for the past year and a half, but has yet to find one.

China Express & Donuts offers an eclectic mix of coffee and doughnuts as well as a buffet of Chinese food, including chow mein, fried rice and pot stickers. Chan immigrated to California from Cambodia in 1981, and learned to make doughnuts from fellow Cambodians while working at a Chinese restaurant, according to KQED.

Cambodian-owned doughnut shops are not uncommon in California. Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee who landed at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton in 1975, shaped the doughnut shop business as we know it in California, according to Food & Wine. He eventually owned dozens of shops across California, and helped hundreds of other Cambodian refugee families open their own doughnut businesses. He’s even responsible for doughnut shops’ characteristic pink boxes.

Chan said that he decided to also offer Chinese food at his doughnut shop because he is “ethnic Chinese-Cambodian” and “knows how to do the food.” It also offers him a way to appeal to the lunch crowd in addition to the coffee-and-doughnuts breakfast crowd.

The past few years have been tough, said Chan, from the pandemic to “the city policies that makes San Francisco not nice to the small business,” though Chan didn’t specify which policies he meant.

Inflation has raised the restaurant’s supply costs, and although he has raised his prices a few times, Chan said he doesn’t feel he can raise them any more, or he will lose customers.

“Everything is expensive in the city,” he said. Currently, three-item lunch plates at China Express & Donuts are just $10.50, while a regular doughnut is $1.70.

Chan said he plans to remain open until he finds the right buyer. The asking price is $150,000, according to a listing on BizBuySell.

“If somebody young has the energy to do it, this is the right place,” he said. “This is a prime location.”