PLACE STORY · RESEDA
Heart's Coffee Shop closed in Reseda after nearly 50 years. The sign was saved.
The diner is gone. The sign is not.
Heart's Coffee Shop at 16918 Saticoy St. in Reseda served its last plate on Sunday, Aug 9 — after nearly 50 years.
The short version of a long story:
1969 — Yuk and Sue Wong arrive from China with little money and no English.
1979 — after about a decade of working and saving, they buy the coffee shop, with help from the retiring owner.
Then nearly five decades of traditional breakfast and lunch, a vintage dining room, and that heart-shaped sign out on Saticoy.
It survived recessions. It survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It survived a Valley that rebuilt itself around it several times over.
What it didn't survive was the math. Rising food and labor costs, plus staffing shortages. Their daughter Susan Wong-Young told KTLA that her parents resisted raising prices because they didn't want to pass the costs on to longtime customers — and eventually the shop was losing money. The family decided it was time for them to retire.
A developer has bought the property and plans to demolish the building.
But the heart is being saved. The sign is headed to the Valley Relics Museum near Van Nuys Airport, where a lot of the Valley's best signs ended up.
I think about this one a lot in my line of work. A building is an asset. A sign is a memory. They don't always get to leave together.
Sources
- Patch, July 31, 2026, reporting KTLA
Accessed and verified 2026-08-20.
