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IRVINE, Calif. — When the Taiwanese bakery opened for business a decade ago, the line for taro bread and sea-salt coffee undulated down the sidewalk, but at least it wasn’t the three-hour wait for Shanghainese hot pot that plugged up the same shopping center this year. Still, that was preferable to the half-day’s perseverance required for entry to the South Coast Plaza branch of Din Tai Fung, the upscale soup-dumpling chain that, for three weeks this winter, threw a crystal-bedecked Lunar New Year party more elaborate than that of most Chinatowns.

Chinese and Korean immigrants, and Asian-Americans from other states, have made Irvine nearly half Asian. This has not gone unnoticed by the Irvine Company, the developer that did not so much develop as invent this master-planned city of spotless parks, top schools and cul-de-sacs out of a former sheep ranch in the 1960s, when Orange County was agricultural (think lima beans and orange groves), conservative (think Richard Nixon and the John Birch Society) and white (very, very white).

Known for its devotion to tasteful Mediterranean-ish homes and strip malls that bear approximately the same architectural relationship to Tuscany as the Las Vegas Venetian does to Venice, the company has cultivated a few new trademarks in recent years. Developments advertise second kitchens designed to seal off the aroma of Asian cooking. In-law suites cater to the Asian custom of multigenerational living. Asians smile out of ersatz family photos in the model homes. And Asian immigrant couples have been buying homes up — often for millions, often in cash.

“Asians,” said Sukhee Kang, who became the first Korean-American to run a major American city when he was elected mayor of Irvine in 2008, “are good for business.”