For the absolute best views of California’s most unhinged shopping mall building, folks tend to stand on the dirty asphalt behind a Hobby Lobby near Los Angeles — the closer to the dumpsters, the better. That’s the best distance for taking the whole spectacle in at once.
The second-best view, though, is right up close, where you can touch the sandy walls and adore the tall, seated statues of Pharaoh Ramses II. Covered in hieroglyphs and ornate carvings of people, birds and boats, this tan oddity really is a marvel, etched out to closely mirror the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel in southern Egypt. The builders even nailed the wear and tear, like the slab of exposed sandstone where a pharaoh’s now-missing head once sat.
The Abu Simbel temples were chipped away slowly more than 3,200 years ago and remain in place today. This Southern California replica, the one opposite an Arby’s, only sprung up around 2016, when construction plans were first submitted to the city of Chino Hills. Technically, it’s not even finished yet — and it may never be.
The Egyptian Building, as it’s come to be known, did have an original purpose: It was supposed to become a restaurant, a sprawling and banquet-y spot called Farou Foods. The generously sized and certainly eye-catching affair, measuring almost 6,000 square feet, was meant to anchor the Commons at Chino Hills, an otherwise nondescript outdoor shopping plaza with a Lowe’s and Dave’s Hot Chicken.
The materials used to build those odes to Ramses II (more affectionately known as Ramses the Great or, by the Greeks, Ozymandias) are said to have been pulled out of Egypt itself and sent over via container ship for construction — at least according to the parking lot security guy.
The place got pretty far along; the large pharaoh carvings, completed by early 2019, can be easily seen from the nearby 71 freeway, making the Egyptian Building an unofficial mascot for the shopping center. But now the erstwhile Farou Foods is stuck, immortalized like its predecessor back in Egypt, spinning in sand.
By all accounts, the pandemic put a quick halt to the work being done on the restaurant, and the building has laid fallow ever since. The public information officer for the city of Chino Hills confirmed to SFGATE that the building today is essentially a shell. The inside of the restaurant is still mostly just bare walls, exposed beams and little hope.
“No interior tenant improvements have been completed, and the space remains unoccupied,” the city representative wrote to SFGATE, though word through the halls of power in Chino Hills is that ownership is “continuing to explore options” for the property. For now, it’s just … there, waiting to be looked at and photographed, but that’s about it.
Perhaps Farou Foods will rise someday, or some other interested tenant will come along to fully rehabilitate the Commons’ unique Egyptian Building. Or perhaps the whole thing will end up as a footnote to human hubris, as described by English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his famous poem “Ozymandias” about the seated pharaoh now found in Chino Hills. In the poem, Shelley tells of a crumbling statue of Ramses II out in the desert, calling it a “colossal wreck, boundless and bare” as it withers away after years of desolation. Those who look on the ailing statue, once so full of history and promise, now see only despair.
Who knew the poem, written more than 200 years ago in London, could reach all the way to a strip mall in Southern California and land right across the parking lot from a BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse?
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March 18, 2025
SoCal Bureau Chief