It’s a phenomenon hard to quantify - but also hard to miss for a guy like me who’s trod the crowded streets since the early 1970s. While “B” and “C” grades dot many windows, there are fewer signs with any grades than there used to be. The dirty little secret of Chinatown’s traditional, mostly Cantonese restaurants is not the Health Department. I still drop by at Wo Hop, a grimy downstairs dumpling joint on Mott Street, where beef with oyster sauce tastes exactly as it did when I first set foot there in 1973. Who cares if they’re a “tsunami of salty soups, leaden dumplings, and clammy, glutinous sauces,” as New York magazine’s Adam Platt wrote in 2014? They’re mostly lovable for evoking not only old Chinatown, but old New York. because no part of Manhattan so readily offers better food for less money,” where owners “still buy fresh snow pea shoots each day.” New York Times critic Pete Wells wrote in 2012, “We eat in Chinatown. Sure, Chinatown’s eateries are still hugely popular. The 225-room, glass-wrapped “boutique” inn, to open later this year, looks as much at home amidst 19th-century tenements as a 24-hour heliport would in the middle of Central Park.īut the most worrying trend is the changing restaurant scene. If Industrial and Commercial Bank of China at Canal and Mulberry streets sounds familiar, you might have read that it’s the largest office tenant at Trump Tower.Īnd there’s the new 22-story hotel that looms like a lost dragon over low-rise Elizabeth Street and the Bowery. The three-story building was recently sold for $2.7 million - a puny price by local standards but enough to spell the end of a business that had been on the block since 1933.Ĭreeping in are a new breed of uptown-style restaurants where few Chinese faces are seen, repetitive retail stores - and bank branches. This week, family-owned noodle and rice store Fong Inn Too, at 46 Mott Street, closed forever. It hasn’t been the same since the grimy but beloved Chinatown Fair arcade lost its Tic-Tac-Toe-playing chicken a few years ago. ![]() Omens of upheaval to come are everywhere - once you look past famous giant banquet barns like Ping’s and Jing Fong (“Dim sum on demand”) and beloved holes-in-the-wall such as Great NY Noodletown, where Momofuku superchef David Chang drops by after hours for ginger scallion noodles.Ĭhinatown’s warren of narrow streets, where soy and ginger waft on the breeze, is starting to lose its mystique. The Year of the Rooster could be a wake-up call that Chinatown is steadily, if slowly, changing into something long-time New Yorkers might not recognize. Kastle's flawed back-to-work barometer continues to fall short of REBNY data unlikely to undergo redevelopmentīungled migrant crisis, and so much more: The party is over for NYC Mayor Eric Adamsįried Frank holiday party returns in full force Macy's Herald Square flagship, Bloomingdale's at 59th St. ![]() Baccarat signs branding deal with owners of 545 Madison
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