MONTREAL — Garnett Lee started working at Wing Noodles when he was eight years old, packing wonton covers and taking occasional breaks to play hide-and-seek among the noodle machines.
Nearly 60 years later, he has decided to close the doors of the longtime family business at the end of the month, raising questions about the future of the historic building located in the heart of Montreal's Chinatown.
“It will be very difficult not to come here,” Lee said. Behind him, a steady stream of customers came in to pick up their last orders at the counter in the 200-year-old building where the company has long made noodles, cookies and sauces.
“There are a lot of memories here.”
Lee's family history in Canada dates back to 1880, when his great-great-grandfather arrived to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway. Lee's grandfather, Hee Chong Lee, founded the family company in 1897 as an import-export business for Chinese goods called Wing Lung.
The family switched to noodles in 1946 after World War II destroyed shipping lanes and have been making them ever since.
Lee knows every corner of the four-story former school building where the company has operated since 1964. Although automation has reduced the number of employees needed to operate the machines, the company still employs 20 to 25 people, many of whom have been with the company for decades.
He greets employees like old friends and gives them a tour of the flour-smelling premises, filled with humming machines that spit out long stacks of dough for wonton shells, different varieties of noodles and macaroons.
In the basement, sheets of rice noodles are prepared; fried and steamed noodles on the top floor.
At ground level, a circular machine pours small pancakes of dough, dries and folds them into fortune cookies, which are packaged on the second floor by a woman who, with incredibly fast hands, sorts them onto a conveyor belt.
Lee says he decided to close for a number of reasons: rising costs, aging equipment and the upcoming surgery of his brother, who co-manages the establishment. He said they both regularly work 80 to 100 hours a week, even going so far as to help clean the floors when a cleaner can't come.
Manufacturing in the heart of the city also has its downsides, including frequent road closures due to events at the nearby convention center, high taxes and limited parking.
He said he told a city councilman several years ago that he believed Wings was the last manufacturer operating in the heart of downtown.
“He said, 'I'm sure he is,'” Lee said. “If we hadn’t been here so long, we probably would have moved somewhere else.”
News of the closure has caused alarm among groups who work to preserve Chinatown from development pressures that threaten to strip it of its unique character.
The Lee family sold the building to a developer in 2021, prompting concerned citizens to band together to preserve it. Their efforts were successful: the historic core, including the Wings building, was recognized as a provincial heritage site in 2023, and in 2024 as a municipal heritage site.
Jessica Chen, executive director of the group, which aims to protect and promote Chinatown's cultural identity, says Wing Noodles is central to the city's Chinese community.
She says the company supplies many Chinese restaurants, supports community events and initiatives, and provides jobs for generations of people from China and other countries.
“The closure of Wing Noodle has caused a lot of emotion, obviously within the Wing Noodle family and among the employees, they've been there for a long time,” she said. But she said the closure will also galvanize “community mobilization” due to the uncertainty of the building's fate.
The building is currently on the market for almost $5 million, according to a Centris ad that describes it as an “exceptional property” that “offers the potential to convert 43 units into housing in the heart of downtown Montreal.”
Chen's group, the JIA Foundation, is organizing a banquet and fundraiser on Dec. 5 to honor Wing's contributions to Chinatown's economy and develop a “community strategy” for the building. Ideally, she hopes partners will come along and help turn this into a community project.
Lee says he was humbled and humbled by the outpouring of emotion that news of the closure prompted. One regular customer started crying when she heard the news, he said, and another stopped by to leave a fortune cookie-shaped lamp as a going-away gift.
He said many of the company's employees have been with him for decades and plan to retire when the company closes its doors at the end of November.
“What made us happy was seeing them get married, have kids, their kids graduate, their kids have kids,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025.
