There’s still a lot of Chinese people that walk up and down here, and it gives us better access to Soho customers and tourists.”
(The restaurant’s smaller Upper West Side location remained open through much of the pandemic.) “Some would argue this is not considered Chinatown,” Lam says of the Centre Street restaurant, “but it’s close enough. The Centre Street space, which was previously home to the Chinese Red Egg restaurant, came onto Lam’s radar last year, before he made the decision to permanently close Jing Fong. He intends to hire about 15 of the unionized employees when the restaurant opens for indoor dining, due to its smaller size, he says. The iconic Chinatown restaurant let go of around 130 workers in total after closing its Elizabeth Street location, roughly 70 of whom were members of the 318 Restaurant Workers Union, according to Lam. “For this very reason, the former workers of Jing Fong will stay on the picket lines as long as it takes for the Chu family to reopen the Jing Fong dining room.” “The closure of Jing Fong underscores the displacement pressures many longtime commercial and residential tenants in Chinatown and the Lower East Side are experiencing,” 318 Restaurant Workers Union said in a statement addressing the opening. Close to a year later, they continue to rally outside of the Museum of Chinese in America, located across the street from the new Jing Fong, where Chu sits on the board of directors. 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. 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.
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