THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020 7
PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Nom Wah and the Coronavirus
Restaurant Shutdown
A few Saturdays ago, I was surprised
to find at least a dozen people milling
around outside Nom Wah Tea Parlor,
taking pictures and waiting for tables.
On any other weekend, I wouldn’t have
batted an eye. Nom Wah, which cele-
brates its hundredth anniversary this
year, has bragging rights as the oldest
restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Situated on Doyers Street—a boo-
merang-shaped block once known as
the Bloody Angle, for its history of
gang killings—the dim-sum parlor is
one of the neighborhood’s most popular
destinations, especially among tourists,
who line up for dumplings and “OG”
eggrolls. But I was there just as the
COVID-19 pandemic was taking over
the news, and Sinophobic paranoia
was threatening Chinatown businesses
across the country.
The persistence of the crowd was
likely due to the media savvy of Wilson
Tang, Nom Wah’s forty-one-year-old
proprietor, who had been drumming
up attention on Instagram. “There is no
coronavirus bs here,” Tang captioned a
post in February. “#Supportchinatown.”
This wasn’t the first time the fate of the
restaurant had been uncertain. Tang’s
uncle Wally started working there in
1950, as a sixteen-year-old Chinese
immigrant, and bought it in 1974. But
by the time Wilson, a telegenic former
investment banker, took over, in 2010, it
had fallen into decline.
Wilson upgraded the kitchen and
transitioned from cart service to a
made-to-order à-la-carte menu, but he
also preserved the dining room’s dated
diner décor and the once red awning,
which had faded to a dusty pink. Nom
Wah became retro-chic—the perfect
location for a Met Gala pre-party, in
2015 (the theme was China), and an
Instagram darling. In the past four
years, Tang has opened two outposts
in Manhattan, one in Philadelphia, and
three in Shenzhen, China.
On Sunday, March 15th, Mayor Bill
de Blasio ordered all New York City
restaurants to cease service, with the
exception of takeout and delivery. By
that point, several of the city’s dim-sum
parlors had closed of their own accord.
When I spoke to Wilson the following
morning, he told me that he would offer
takeout and delivery from the Nolita
location but not from Chinatown; many
of his employees there, he explained,
are Chinese-Americans who live in
intergenerational households and are
fearful of spreading the virus to relatives.
In Nolita, his staff is much smaller and
skews younger and more diverse. The
revenue from to-go orders wouldn’t even
cover the labor it would take to fulfill
them, but it was a way to use up inven-
tory and “to wind down slowly and stop
the bleeding.”
Nom Wah has seen an uptick in sales
of merchandise and gift certificates
since the shutdown, but that won’t help
much, either. Still, Tang is better poised
to weather the current moment than
many others in the restaurant industry,
which is in a state of panic and despair. In
New York, restaurants are often forced to
operate on razor-thin margins; without
government assistance, many of them
may never reopen. Tang’s uncle owns the
building on Doyers Street, so he doesn’t
have to worry about getting kicked out
for failing to make rent. Taking his lead
from “the big dogs,” like David Chang,
he planned to pay his salaried employees
at least through April, and his hourly
employees at least through the end of the
week. After that, he said, “we’ll play it by
ear. We’re in survival mode.”
Asked about his neighbors in Chi-
natown, he sounded surprisingly opti-
mistic. Small immigrant-run businesses
tend to be “very resourceful and resil-
ient,” he said. “They don’t have debt
and they’re living within their means.”
Nom Wah has survived for a century.
The outposts in Shenzhen, which were
closed for six weeks as the Chinese gov-
ernment fought Covid-19, reopened
recently, and, so far, business hasn’t been
bad. “Confidence in dining out is slowly
building there,” Tang said. “Things are
improving week by week.”
—Hannah Goldfield
