![]() The restaurant closed its dining room on March 10, 2020.Īhead of the closure, unionized Jing Fong employees protested the restaurant’s closure, calling on landlord Jonathan Chu to find a way to keep the Chinatown institution open. Andrew Cuomo announced that gatherings of more than 500 people were prohibited a month later, “that was it,” Lam says. He decided to close on weekdays as a cost-cutting measure and only open on weekends. “I had more staff there than customers that day,” he says. The restaurant’s size was partially to credit for its citywide reputation, according to Lam, along with its downfall during the pandemic.Ī month before coronavirus had been detected in New York state, Lam recalls walking upstairs and counting 36 customers in Jing Fong’s 794-person dining room. When the sprawling room wasn’t filled with diners seated at round tables sharing dumplings and roast duck, the space was often used to host large weddings and events. Jing Fong, which opened in 1978 and moved to its former, two-story home on Elizabeth Street in 1992, was largely recognized as Manhattan Chinatown’s largest dim sum hall. The restaurant’s red carpet, paneling, and wallpaper are meant to evoke “the vibe of Jing Fong,” Truman Lam says. The restaurant’s team of dim sum carts may return to the floor in a limited way - “maybe three or four of them,” he says - and possibly on weekends only. ![]() “We want to do carts in some way,” Lam says, “but given the size of the space, we’re not sure if it makes sense yet.” Indoor dining could follow as early as next week, Lam says, though don’t expect dim sum carts at the start. Jing Fong will open for takeout and delivery to start, as its kitchen staff - almost all of whom worked at the previous location of the restaurant - settles into the new space. “Did people come to Jing Fong for the food, or because the vibe is so awesome?” He’s about to find out. What used to be a multi-sensory, possibly hours-long dining experience - arriving early, or otherwise waiting in lines of Disney proportion riding an escalator upstairs keeping one eye on the room’s roaming dim sum carts - is now mostly about the food. Another NYC speakeasy, this one located behind an ice cream shop on the Upper East Side, has just reopened its doors to customers.At around 100 seats, the new restaurant isn’t small, but it’s a far cry from its former 800-seat home on Elizabeth Street. ![]() Frankly Wines owner Liz Nicholson is seeking donations to get a new Tribeca wine shop off the ground. The lesson is $49.99 per screen, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Stop AAPI Hate. Chef Anita Lo is teaching a virtual cooking class on Friday, May 14 where participants will learn how to make Szechuan chopstick noodles with chili oil. Buzzy new Brooklyn tortilleria Sobre Masa is partnering and hosting the most popular birria destination in the city, Birria-Landia, for a pop-up on Thursday evening, where they’ll be adding bone marrow (!) to the birria. ![]() In a new interview, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang told the Post everything that NYC restaurant and bar owners want to hear right now: He supports dropping the restaurant and bar curfew, eliminating the food-with-drink rule, and wants to make takeout cocktails permanent. It is unclear whether any of Jing Fong’s unionized workers - who gathered together and protested publicly after news broke of the dining room shutdown - will be offered jobs at the new restaurant. Jing Fong - which also operates a second location on the Upper West Side - continued to offer outdoor dining, takeout, and delivery from the Chinatown restaurant after the dining room shut down, but those operations will stop at the end of May. The struggling Chinatown stalwart announced in March that it was closing its iconic dining room after being unable to work out a rent deal with the building’s landlords following a crushing year of plummeting sales due to the pandemic, plus ongoing anti-Asian rhetoric and xenophobic responses to the virus. Eater New York has reached out to Leo for more details. The address of the new outpost wasn’t disclosed in the report. In late June, Jing Fong plans to reopen at a smaller, 125-seat location. ![]() Jing Fong plans to reopen soon in a new locationĮight hundred-seat dim sum destination Jing Fong will permanently clear out of its longstanding Elizabeth Street home on May 31, but the Chinatown restaurant won’t be totally dark for long, marketing director Claudia Leo tells the New York Post. ![]()
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