A large menu complete with photographs to guide you hangs on the wall just before you get up to the counter to order. It’s history.Xi’An is a chain worth going to. “New York City doesn’t belong to New York,” he adds, urging those who have the power to shape the city’s reopening and recovery to keep the neighborhood’s unique significance in mind. “Chinatown is so beautiful,” he says, a fist waving in the air. The emotion is evident in his voice when he talks about the challenges the pandemic has brought to his business and his beloved community. In the video, we see him carefully sprinkling a garnish into a takeout container. But even Tang is adapting: his restaurant is now offering delivery on several apps. Chen Lieh Tang, the chef at the white-tablecloth Hwa Yuan Sichuan, has been skeptical of delivery apps he would prefer for customers to eat his dishes-like a signature braised fish with hot bean sauce or the cold sesame noodles that his father introduced to the American palate-at the restaurant, properly plated and not ferried across town in a plastic bag swinging from a bicycle’s handlebars. But to some, the in-person experience of dining at a restaurant is irreplaceable. A new Chinese-language app, Hungry Panda, gained popularity to deliver Chinese dishes and desserts from different boroughs of New York. Since March, many restaurants have shut down or pivoted to takeout and delivery. In the video, chefs and small-business owners share their perspectives on how the pandemic has changed the neighborhood, and how they are planning to adapt and evolve. But, in the midst of all of these challenges, many of Chinatown’s businesses are preparing to reopen. “Some of the seniors are afraid to go to the grocery store,” Wellington Chen, the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership, tells The New Yorker, in the video above. President Trump has insisted on calling the disease “the Chinese virus,” and racism explicitly targeting Asians has been on the rise. Since the coronavirus broke out this spring, the plummeting foot traffic from tourists and residents has hit Chinatowns especially hard. These businesses are also, for many Chinese immigrants and their families, a way of life: people from all walks of life come to America and shuffle around Chinatowns across the country, washing dishes or delivering meals, dreaming of owning their own restaurant one day. They have long fed New Yorkers with their wide-ranging cuisines, from northwestern China’s Lanzhou-style hand-pulled noodles to Malaysia’s Hainanese chicken rice. Restaurants, groceries, and bakeries are the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown-one of the oldest in the country, a community that dates back to the eighteen-seventies. On the streets, venders selling bright lychee, spiky durian, and hefty mangosteens in mesh nets and plastic containers offered a little tropical sweetness you could bring home to relish before your next visit. In hot-pot restaurants, the steamy air and smell of chili-pepper oil conjured up a cozy warmth that could drive away the tug of loneliness. Inside the great hall of Jing Fong, friends, families, and strangers shared big round tables under elaborate chandeliers, and less patient customers, like myself, chased after waitresses pushing dim-sum carts to track down the chicken feet or precise type of dumpling that we were craving. More than four months into quarantine, I often find myself thinking about that meal, and many others I’ve enjoyed in Chinatown. I ended up ordering a few things I always get: garlicky stir-fried lettuce and crispy calamari covered in salt and pepper. The waiters politely stayed away as I dawdled, studying the menu as if I were trying to spot an error. It was an elegant, old-fashioned place, with faux-leather chairs and wooden screens. Once upon a time, I rode the subway for almost an hour, on a chilly Saturday afternoon-it must have been early March-to have a late lunch at a Cantonese restaurant off Canal Street.
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