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Chinatown’s Iconic Jing Fong Plans to Reopen in New, Smaller Space in Late June

Plus, Andrew Yang voices support for permanent takeout cocktails — and more intel

Several tables under umbrellas on the street with masked diners seated.
Jing Fong’s outdoor dining setup last summer
Robert Sietsema/Eater NY
Erika Adams is the editor of Eater Boston.

Jing Fong plans to reopen soon in a new location

Eight 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. In late June, Jing Fong plans to reopen at a smaller, 125-seat location. The address of the new outpost wasn’t disclosed in the report. Eater New York has reached out to Leo for more details.

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. 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.

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.

In other news

— 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.

— 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.

— 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. The lesson is $49.99 per screen, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Stop AAPI Hate.

— Frankly Wines owner Liz Nicholson is seeking donations to get a new Tribeca wine shop off the ground.

— Another NYC speakeasy, this one located behind an ice cream shop on the Upper East Side, has just reopened its doors to customers.

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