Urban Hawker, the Singaporean food hall that Anthony Bourdain helped dream up and food critic, host, and writer K.F. Seetoh brought to life in Midtown, will close Friday, July 17. The building at 135 West 50th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues,
has been sold for redevelopment, ending what the folks at the Hainan Jones stall called “a great four-year run” in their Instagram post.
The hall opened in September 2022 with over 15 stalls partly assembled by Seetoh, whodeveloped ideas for the hall with Bourdain at the World Street Food Congress in Singapore nearly a decade earlier, years before Bourdain’s death. Urbanspace partnered with Seetoh on the project, which brought over 10 chefs from Singapore to operate the stalls on two levels running from 50th to 51st streets.
The hall also made news for a different reason: Seetoh posted on Instagram that Urban Hawker stalls would hire migrants being bused into the city from Texas as New York scrambled to house thousands of newly arrived migrants in emergency shelters and hotels.
In the opening week, Eater’s Robert Sietsema made a beeline for Hainan Jones, specializing in Hainanese chicken rice, calling the steamed chicken “so delicately spiced, the broth-soaked rice so rich, the chile sauce so orange and nuanced, that the dish was exceptional. I could eat it for lunch every day.” He was also taken with Mamak’s Corner, which presented Indian food as adapted on Southeast Asia’s Malay peninsula: the murtabak, a roti folded around ground meat and egg with chunky peanut sauce, and a lamb biryani he described as “more like a lamb curry poured over pilaf rice, with an elusive flavor that hinted of camphor.”
Urban Hawker also marked the debut of Lady Wong, which Eater namedBest New Bakeryin 2022. There, Mogan Anthony and co-owner Seleste Ta introduced what would become some of the city’s best kuih. When he first visited, Sietsema singled out the sardine puff as “one of the best things we tried,” alongside a passionfruit and calamansi layer cake and a pandan cake in a pleasing shade of mint green.
Facing the closure Lady Wong couple is taking it in stride. “It does affect our business to an extent, but most of our customers order for shipping and delivery,” Anthony told Eater. Lady Wong maintains a standalone location in the East Village as well as one in Connecticut. “We’ve also been working on Lady Wong 2.0 since. It’s been five years. It’s time to refresh and stay relevant.”
The folks at Hainan Jones say the closure — which they’ve known about for at least a year — isn’t the end of Singapore food culture in New York, as it reads on Instagram: “It may be curtains down at Urban Hawker, but it ain’t the end for Singapore makan culture there. Another door will always be open.”
