PRICE RANGE Most dishes are $3.50 to $15.95; dishes incorporating live seafood, abalone or shark fin are more expensive.
RECOMMENDED DISHES: Fried bean curd with mashed shrimp, braised abalone, crispy live shrimp, sauteed crispy shredded squid, stir-fried pig's stomach and dried squid, winter melon soup.
The menu seems to go on forever, with the first seven pages devoted to lists of inedible medals, awards and gongs dating back to 1968, followed by Cantonese classics such as barbecued Chinese pork, steamed live fish and Imperial abalone.
Abalone mainly live on sea weeds that contain rich and concentrated nutritional components [ 2].
Paul Dayton and Mia Tegner from Scripps have tracked the decline of the white abalone, a shellfish living in the kelp off the Californian coast that has been ruthlessly pursued.
Even as the focus of the Chinese community moved 10 miles east, and the food malls that lined Broadway were eclipsed by the shinier complexes in the new Chinatowns of San Gabriel and Monterey Park, Empress' live scallop dishes and sun-dried abalone held their own against the other Hong Kong-style competitors Harbour Village and Ocean Star.
Nonetheless, there has been a recent rapid increase in the collection of live kelp as feed for an expanding cultured abalone industry.
What's more important are the tanks of live seafood in the rear — crabs, lobster, prawns and abalone for those times when you want to experience the kind of porridge a billionaire might fancy.
Abalone fishers (an abalone is a highly prized Australian mollusc that lives in deep water) and other divers, have more daughters as do professional drivers, pilots of high performance aircraft, anaesthetists and astronauts.
Although the nutritional composition of abalone visceral extract have not yet been identified in depth, since abalone live on brown algae like Ecklonia, Laminaria and Undaria for cultivation [ 2], it is regarded that the visceral portion of abalone may contain concentrated nutritional components derived from sea weed.
