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

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.

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