A Chinatown Bakery Closes, and the Neighborhood Loses a Bit More of Its Flavor
In 1961, when New Golden Fung Wong Bakery opened, Chinatown was a very different place. Due to restrictive immigration law and early immigration patterns, the city’s Chinese community was Cantonese and Toisanese. This was who places like New Golden Fung Wong served, and Toisan favorites like tikoy (the steamed rice-flour cake known in Cantonese as nian gao) are still displayed on the deli case of treats. Over the years, the bakery became a destination for specialties like mooncakes, available year-round in flavors like black bean and winter melon, gleaming from their egg wash; the white biscuit called kong soh peng; and hopia, made with a flaky crust and fillings like black bean and green onion with pork fat. In a few weeks, however, this slice of history will disappear. On July 31, the bakery will close, news that was first shared on the business’s social-media channels, even as the reasons why remain unclear: Two employees said they didn’t know, and that the owner was unavailable to speak.
New Golden Fung Wong is not the sort of place mentioned among the neighborhood’s famous old institutions, like Nom Wah, Wo Hop, and Jing Fong. (Chinatown’s many bakeries don’t often factor into this view of the neighborhood.) Still, it holds a special place for many people who grew up in, around, or visiting family in the neighborhood: In 2018, one employee, described as a relative of the owner’s wife, told a reporter that she worked at the bakery for free to help out because of the difficulties of running a business.
“The first time I remember going was around 2020 or ’21, kind of still at the peak of the pandemic. My friends were part of this run club, called Run for Chinatown. They did this Mid-Autumn Mile as a secret fundraiser for the bakery. It was kind of not making a lot of money during the pandemic,” says Sonia Tsang, a college student from Brooklyn who has family in the neighborhood. “I started going more, grabbing a little lemon-honey tea in-and-out, and one of the employees, Kelly, asked if I had any recommendations for cameras. That was really sweet, and it made me want to come back.”
Ariane Hardjowirogo, who grew up near Union Square and now works in wine, says that when she was very young her dad would take her every Sunday to get the shop’s Buddha cookie. “I loved that cookie! I would say from about 3 to 5 years old — that was our routine,” she says. She hadn’t been back in a while until last year, when she took her son. “We kind of stumbled in on a rainy day on our way to dim sum — I was excited to share it with him, as it was something my dad shared with me.”
On that visit, Hardjowirogo says she found the Buddha cookies more fun to look at than eat. But the shop was better known for other specialties and several customers have, in response to the news, asked for recipes for the hopia and kong soh peng. Bonnie’s chef Calvin Eng, who grew up in Bensonhurst, remembers coming in for a crispier treat. “My mom and aunt would bring me there for the ham sui gok because it was perfectly crispy, without being too thick or greasy, while being stuffed with a healthy portion of ground pork and salty bits,” he recalls.
As residents get older and gentrification creeps in, Manhattan’s local Chinatown community has been on the decline for years while Flushing and Sunset Park are well-established as the centers of Chinese life in New York. Augustine Tang, who grew up on Orchard and Broome and works in real estate, lamented the possibility of the space becoming “another bubble-tea shop.” He pointed to another nearby bakery, Lung Moon, that closed in late 2020. More than three years later, that bakery’s storefront is still vacant, with a note plastered to its door thanking customers for their support over the last 53 years. “I do feel like staple bakeries have been closing,” Tang writes.
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