MONTREAL — Garnet Lee started working at Wing Noodles when he was eight years old, packaging wonton covers and occasionally taking breaks to play hide-and-seek among the noodle machines.
Nearly 60 years later, he has decided to close the doors of the long-standing family business at the end of the month, raising questions about the future of the historic building that sits in the heart of Montreal’s Chinatown.
“It’s going to be very hard to not come here,” said Lee. Behind him, a steady stream of customers popped in to pick up final orders at the counter of the 200-year-old building where the company has long produced noodles, cookies and sauces.
“There are lots and lots of memories here.”
Lee’s family history in Canada stretches back to 1880, when his great-great-grandfather arrived to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway. Lee’s grandfather, Hee Chong Lee, started the family company in 1897 as an import-export business of Chinese goods, under the name Wing Lung.
The family pivoted to noodles in 1946, after the Second World War disrupted shipping lanes, and have been making them ever since.
Lee knows every corner of the four-storey former school building where the company has operated since 1964. While automation has reduced the number of employees needed to run the machines, the company still employs 20 to 25 people, many of whom have worked for the company for decades.
He greets employees like old friends as he gives a tour of the flour-scented rooms filled with humming machines that spit out long reams of dough for wonton covers, different varieties of noodles, and almond cookies.
There are rice noodle sheets made in the basement; fried and steamed noodles on the top floor.
At ground level, a circular machine pours little dough pancakes and dries and folds them into fortune cookies that will be packaged on floor two, by a woman who sorts them onto a conveyor belt with impossibly fast hands.
Lee says he decided to close for a combination of reasons: rising costs, aging machines, and an upcoming surgery for his brother, who co-runs the place. Both of them regularly work 80 to 100 hours a week, he says, down to helping to scrub down the floors if the cleaning crew can’t come.
There are also disadvantages to manufacturing right in the heart of the city, including frequent road closures for events at the nearby convention centre, high taxes and limited parking.
He said he told a city councillor a few years ago that he thought Wings was the last manufacturer operating in the heart of the downtown core.
“He said, ‘I’m sure you are,'” Lee said. “If we weren’t here for so long we probably would have moved somewhere else.”
News of the closure has raised alarm bells among groups that have been working to preserve Chinatown from development pressures that have threatened to strip it of its unique character.
The Lee family sold the building to a developer in 2021, which prompted concerned citizens to rally for its preservation. Their efforts succeeded: the historic core, including the Wings building, was designated a provincial heritage site in 2023, and a municipal one in 2024.
Jessica Chen, the executive director of a group that aims to protect and promote Chinatown’s cultural identity, says Wing Noodles has been central to the city’s Chinese community.
She says it supplies many Chinese restaurants, supports community events and initiatives, and has provided employment to generations of people from China and elsewhere.
“With Wing Noodle closing there’s a lot of emotion, within obviously the Wing Noodle family and the employees, they’ve been there for a long time,” she said. But she said the closure is also stirring up “community mobilization” due to the uncertainty of the building’s fate.
The building is currently listed for almost $5 million, according to a Centris ad that describes it as an “exceptional property” that “offers a residential conversion potential of 43 units in the heart of downtown Montreal.”
Chen’s group, JIA Foundation, is organizing a banquet and fundraiser on Dec. 5 to celebrate Wing’s contribution to Chinatown’s economy and to build a “community strategy” for the building. Ideally, she’s hoping partners will come forward to help develop it into a community project.
Lee says he’s been honoured and humbled by the outpouring of emotion the news of the closure has stirred. One long-term customer started crying when she heard the news, he said, while another stopped by to drop off a fortune-cookie-shaped lamp as a goodbye present.
He said many of the company’s employees have been with him for decades, and are planning to retire when the company closes its doors at the end of November.
“What was satisfying for us is how we got to see them get married, have children, their children have graduated, their children have children,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025.
Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press
