Question of the Day - 28 December 2022

The Eureka has a long and interesting story as an independent casino in the era of casino corporations and consolidations. 

Theodore “Ted” Bo Lee was born in California in 1932. His father had immigrated from Guangdong, China, and became a butcher and grocer; his mother’s family owned several Chinese restaurants. Growing up, Ted worked in both his parents’ businesses. As a teenager, his ambition was to attend Harvard, at a time when precious few Asians or any minorities attended Ivy League schools. But his grades, persistence, and charm got him admitted and he graduated from Harvard in 1954. After a stint in the Army, he attended law school at UC Berkeley, then spent time in Singapore on a fellowship. 

Returning to the U.S., Ted lived in San Francisco, where he met his second wife, Doris. He also went back to Berkeley and earned an MBA, specializing in real estate.

Together, Ted and Doris founded numerous businesses — industrial, retail, real estate — in the Bay Area and Las Vegas, when Doris’s father opened a National Dollar Store at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street. They saw the potential for growth in Las Vegas and put a sizable percentage of their funds into real estate here. 

By 1988, they were interested in the casino business and bought Friendly Fergie’s, a small joint that had been operating since 1964 where the Bonanza gift shop now stands. 

In 1992, they closed Fergie’s and built the Eureka from the ground up on a lot they owned at 595 E. Sahara Avenue, a few blocks east of Paradise Road. At the time, it was one of the few neighborhood casinos and has been popular ever since with locals for its 250 slots, easy comps, casino bar, and Fat Choy, the restaurant mentioned in the question.

Fat Choy opened there in 2012, when chef Sheridan Su met with the Lees and came up with the concept: classic American diner with a twist on Asian comfort foods. It’s one of the best little restaurants in town, one of Anthony Curtis’s favorites, and has had a couple of meals in the Top Ten over the years. 

The Lees expanded the Eureka brand to Mesquite, Nevada. They’d opened the Rancho Mesquite in 1996, with the hotel run by Holiday Inn and the casino operated by the Longhorn group. Due to reported “confusion with other Mesquite businesses,” the name was changed to Eureka in 2000. The Lees sold the Eureka in 2016 to its 500 employees in an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, making it one of only two casinos in the country to be employee-owned.

The Lees are revered here as philanthropists. Their most enduring legacy is at UNLV and the Lee Business School, renamed after the family made a $15 million donation to the university. Ten million funded 10 endowed professorships, $2.5 million went toward a scholarship program, and $2.5 million was earmarked for a lecture series.

Doris Lee died in 2018 at the age of 98. Ted Lee died in August 2021 at the age of 88.