“We are surviving one day at a time,” Kevin Zheng, the thirty-year-old manager and co-owner of Sichuan Hot Pot, told me, as I sat down to dinner in his cavernous restaurant, on Pell Street, in Chinatown, last Friday. It was 7 P.M. and I was the only patron in a dining room that seats a hundred people. Like every commercial establishment in Chinatown, Sichuan Hot Pot has taken an unprecedented hit in the days since the world was introduced to COVID-19. Business began sagging in January, around the Chinese New Year, and plummetted last week, when New York City declared a state of emergency and announced restrictions on public gatherings.
Operating at a loss was already a reality for some restaurants in Chinatown, but the inability to operate at all was also becoming a possibility, Zheng told me. And then there is the welfare of his workers: Zheng currently employs more than a dozen waiters, cooks, and dishwashers, and he is worried about how they will cope if he has to close. Some restaurants in the neighborhood—including the dim-sum palace Jing Fong, which has been in business on Elizabeth Street since 1972—have already been forced to do so, at least temporarily. At one of my favorite Chinese supermarkets, New Kam Man, on Canal Street, the genial owner, Wellman Wu, a man in his seventies, told me that, last month, the Kam Man stores (the supermarket is part of a small chain) were down by two hundred thousand dollars. On the day I visited last week, he was closing the store’s lunch counter, where I order eel over rice and seafood noodle soup nearly every week. “I didn’t have a choice,” Wu said. This past Sunday, the city announced that all restaurants, bars, and cafés must close, except for takeout and delivery service. Nobody knows for how long that will continue. On Monday, I stopped by Sichuan Hot Pot again. Zheng wasn’t there, but I asked a young waitress if she knew what his plans are. “I don’t,” she said, handing me a menu, perhaps out of sheer force of habit. “We are making decisions hour by hour at this point.”
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