Dragon House — the Southlake Chinese restaurant that closed in connection with a vice investigation last month — is back in business.
The restaurant reopened Nov. 20 with the same chef, cooks, waiters and other employees, the manager Michael Teng said on Thursday night. Teng said that he is in the process of transferring ownership of the restaurant to himself and two partners, one of whom is the Dragon House chef Huang Jian Yan. He did not identify the third partner.
“It’s going to be an employee-owned restaurant,” Teng said, adding that the transfer of ownership "should be done in three weeks.”
Teng said he was in Taiwan visiting his wife’s family when police raided the restaurant on Oct. 30 and arrested the woman they identified as its owner, Yong Bei Wang Murphy, in connection with a prostitution ring run out of Jade Spa, a Dallas massage parlor. It was one of six arrests connected to Jade Spa, and police have said more charges are likely, including money laundering.
“Everybody is in shock,” Teng said. “We did nothing wrong. There was nothing illegal happening at the restaurant.”
Until the arrests, Dragon House was a celebrated new addition on the D-FW food scene, a family spot in a Southlake strip center that had earned a three-star review in The Dallas Morning News for its intricate dumplings, tender noodles and excellent regional Chinese fare.
Police said that the restaurant and the spa were both owned by Murphy and that the two businesses shared the same bank accounts and in at least one case, the same employee ― a Dragon House hostess.
Though both Jade Spa and Dragon House closed after the Oct. 30 raids, police issued a temporary restraining order only on the spa. A hearing is scheduled on Nov. 22 concerning its ongoing closure.
At Dragon House, police executed a search warrant but did not close down the restaurant with a temporary restraining order. Since then, Dragon House has apparently been shuttered by choice, until Teng and his partners reopened it on Wednesday.
Teng said he returned from Taiwan on Nov. 3 and immediately been working toward reopening the restaurant.
“I went to the City of Southlake and they said it was no problem” to reopen, he said, “because they didn’t find anything illegal happening here.”
Dallas police were not available comment on Thursday night. City of Southlake offices were closed.
As of Nov. 7, Murphy — a Shanghai native and Vancouver resident — was in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at a detention center in Alvarado. An ICE spokesman said that in Dec. 2000, Murphy was convicted of prostitution in Dallas County, and sent back to Canada five years later. After an attempted illegal return to the U.S., she returned legally in 2014, after she was granted parole by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Murphy, who most diners called Lucy, then ran another acclaimed Chinese restaurant, Fortune House in Irving, for two and a half years. In 2015, it earned three stars (out of a possible five stars, in the News’ old rating system).
With both restaurants, Murphy said she drew on connections in Vancouver’s legendary Chinese restaurant community to hire top-notch chefs.
At Dragon House, that included a dumpling master who moved from Taiwan to work at the restaurant and a hand-pulled noodle specialist who was previously working in New York City. Both are back at the restaurant, Teng said, as well as chef Huang Jian Yan, who was formerly the chef at Chinese embassies in Australia, Denmark and Houston and is now part of the new ownership group.
Teng also said that Murphy was not Dragon House’s owner. Chung Shendelman, one of the others arrested, released ownership of Dragon House to Teng’s group, he said.
When we called on Thursday night, Teng was outside hanging a new banner. It reads: “Under new management.”
Staff writer Robert Wilonsky contributed to this story.
