Flushing’s Highly Competitive New Dining Scene

by Carla Vianna 

TakeTake a look at the current restaurant options at One Fulton Square in downtown Flushing — a mixed-use development home to luxe condos, retail, and a hotel — and you’ll get a good idea of what’s in store for the neighborhood’s future.

Located on Prince Street between 39th and Roosevelt avenues, the glossy development built by F&T Group in 2014 houses over a dozen restaurant and bars — a combination of new places like Korean fried chicken restaurant the Coop, outposts of well-liked New York restaurants like Spot Dessert Bar, and some large Asian chains, like Malaysia’s enormously popular fast-casual company Papparich, which planted its first East Coast location inside the complex. The modern center is also home to one of the city’s most revered upscale restaurants. Sichuan restaurant Guan Fu landed a glowing three-star review in the Times in 2017, one of the few Chinese restaurants in the history of the paper to do so.

These new restaurant options are a sharp contrast to Flushing’s reputation as a haven for “cheap eats” and Chinese hawker stalls. Instead, they’re representative of a rapidly evolving dining scene — one that caters to a growing population of young Asian students with disposable incomes, as well as to a wealthier and more diverse wave of Chinese residents moving into the area’s high-end real estate developments. Demand has risen for restaurants that serve food from different regions of China, and there’s now an audience for ones that combine elements from multiple Asian cuisines, too. The new crew of restaurants also places far more emphasis on contemporary decor and theatrical presentations, like pork ribs in birdcages or a Barbie doll wearing a dress made of meat, driven in part by social media.

Much of the shift has been fueled by a real estate boom that began years ago, when developers set their eyes on downtown Flushing’s unparalleled density. It’s the city’s largest Chinatown and home to one of the busiest intersections in all of NYC, at Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

But the growth has also had a cost. The changes inflated rental rates and flooded the market with an overwhelming supply of dining options — sometimes forcing out the original, immigrant-run restaurants that put Flushing’s dining scene on the map.

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