Shun Lee or Not Shun Lee? For Chinese Food Lovers, That Is the Question.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/nyregion/new-york-shun-lee-chinese-restaurants.html
https://archive.ph/VZwXI

Shun Lee or Not Shun Lee? For Chinese Food Lovers, That Is the Question.
An identity crisis involving a vaunted Chinese restaurant and the New Yorkers who love it strikes the Upper West Side.
By Katherine Rosman
April 7, 2023

The text message from Danny Cramer’s mother to the family group chat arrived with urgency. “Look what’s going into the empty storefront at 98th and Broadway,” she wrote, punctuating her sentence with chopsticks, fortune cookie and noisemaker emojis.

“Whoopee!!!” Mr. Cramer’s Aunt Julie replied. “Wowwww,” Uncle Frank added.

The occasion appeared auspicious: A new outpost of Shun Lee, New York’s storied Chinese restaurant, had arrived. Mr. Cramer, 28, has been enjoying special occasion meals since he was a child at Shun Lee, a brand so embedded in the cultural history of the city that Shun Lee matchbooks dating to the 1960s are part of the permanent collection at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library.

Mr. Cramer, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, arranged to schlep 40 minutes on the subway to his childhood apartment on the Upper West Side to order takeout.

But for Mr. Cramer’s family, as for other Shun Lee fans, elation quickly turned to confusion and even anger. The new Shun Lee is not the same as the venerated Shun Lee Palace, in Midtown, or Shun Lee West and Shun Lee Cafe, near Lincoln Center.

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