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.
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.
Chinatown’s warren of narrow streets, where soy and ginger waft on the breeze, is starting to lose its mystique. 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.
Creeping in are a new breed of uptown-style restaurants where few Chinese faces are seen, repetitive retail stores — and bank branches. 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.
And there’s the new 22-story hotel that looms like a lost dragon over low-rise Elizabeth Street and the Bowery. 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.
But the most worrying trend is the changing restaurant scene. Sure, Chinatown’s eateries are still hugely popular. New York Times critic Pete Wells wrote in 2012, “We eat in Chinatown . . . because no part of Manhattan so readily offers better food for less money,” where owners “still buy fresh snow pea shoots each day.”
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.
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.
The dirty little secret of Chinatown’s traditional, mostly Cantonese restaurants is not the Health Department. While “B” and “C” grades dot many windows, there are fewer signs than there used to be. 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.
It pains me to see 1 Mott St., an iconic address that was home to a long succession of Chinese cafes, now occupied by Ali Baba Organic Market.
Chinatown’s eateries always drew a mix of the neighborhood’s 40,000 mostly low-income residents and Chinese and non-Chinese celebrants from elsewhere. Now, for the first time, it’s sprouted a colony of adjacent venues designed mainly for thrill-seekers from beyond, for whom the nabe might be a Chinatown theme park.
When our friendly waiter at the fine new Chinese Tuxedo said of our noodles-and-dumplings order, “Let’s do it, guys,” I knew I wasn’t in the Chinatown I remember. The thumping bass soundtrack belonged more in clubland than on Doyers Street. The chef’s a Scotsman by way of Australia.
Atmospheric, curving Doyers Street is also home to a gentrified, cleaned-up version of eternally grungy Nom Wah Tea Parlor. Mixology-driven cocktail haven Apothoke draws boozing suburbanites to the site of a long-ago opium den.
Tucked in their midst, a slightly spooky stairway previously descended to a subterranean rice shop. It now leads to Pulqueria, offering fare scarce in any Chinese region — tequila and tacos. Asian faces were hard to spot at any of the four places one night last week.
Chinatown’s traditional restaurants are slowly dwindling — especially Cantonese, which first lost ground to spicy Szechuanese and more recently to Fujianese, the lighter style of China’s southeast coast.
Wellington Chen, president of the Chinatown Business Improvement District, insists, “You’re the first one to comment that there’s less.” He said new places have offset the closing of older ones, and noted that the BID has counted 300 places to eat within the district.
When our friendly waiter at the fine new Chinese Tuxedo said of our noodles-and-dumplings order, “Let’s do it, guys,” I knew I wasn’t in the Chinatown I remember.
Problem is, nobody knows for sure how many there were five, 10 or 25 years ago. News stories from the late 1990s cited 350 restaurants — which would mean a 15 percent decline since then. Moreover, the BID’s current total includes food-service spots with handfuls of seats that aren’t exactly restaurants and were not as common in the past — bakeries, bubble-tea parlors and endlessly multiplying ice-cream shops.
They’re gobbling up more and more storefronts on Mott, Pell and Bayard streets in the district’s heart. So are Chinese-owned jewelry shops, boutiques, beauty and health spas, art galleries, gourmet food shops and medical clinics. Also taking hold are Japanese ramen noodle joints — a sure sign of a culinary sea-change.
At least one restaurateur owned up to the shrinkage. James Tang, 32, a grandson of legendary noodle master and Szechuanese pioneer “Shorty” Tang, said emphatically, “There are not as many restaurants” as there were a few years ago.
Tang’s family, led by his dad, Chen Lieh Tang, will soon reopen Hwa Yuan at 40 East Broadway, a building they’ve owned for 40 years. Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn was my favorite Chinatown place. Launched in 1968, it catalyzed the craze for Szechuanese cuisine that eclipsed Cantonese in the 1970s through the early 1990s.
But, reflecting Chinatown’s creeping gentrification, the new Hwa Yuan — on three floors behind a burnished marble facade — won’t resemble the cheap, simply decorated original. Tang said his “fine dining” version aims to attract mainly “ABC’s” — American-born Chinese, young to middle-aged urban professionals who were born here.”
Chinatown fortunately isn’t being sold off to outsiders, as Little Italy was. It remains nearly 100 percent Chinese-American owned.
The resilience was due to what New York magazine in 2015 termed an “establishment” of Chinese property owners, trade and church organizations and benevolent associations that kept it a “self-sustaining city unto itself,” largely immune to outside pressure.
But new apartment buildings in Chinatown and nearby draw more affluent local residents with a greater need for cosmetics and clothing than for dumplings.
Restaurants have taken a beating on all fronts. Apparel-making jobs in the district fell from 40,000 in the 1980s to 14,000 by the late 1990s, and plunged to half that many after 9/11, when streets into and out of the neighborhood were closed.
The flight of clothing factories upstairs from the wonton parlors meant the loss of workers who ate out after their shifts — a big reason why fewer Chinatown restaurants stay open late.
Meanwhile, the area’s culinary cred was getting clobbered by the Chinatowns of Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn — both praised for having more authentic “regional” food.
Chinatown’s rep further suffered when, as Crain’s reported in 2013, nearly half of its eateries were socked with B and C grades by the Health Department — compared with 20 percent of restaurants citywide. The poor grades were due less to actual health risks than to poor communication between inspectors and owners who spoke little or no English — but were enough to scare off customers.
Meanwhile, the city’s tourism boom created demand for fancy new hotels everywhere, such as the one going up on the Bowery.
This certainly isn’t the end of Chinatown, but even here, as with every corner of New York, gentrification, with all its discontents, marches on.
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