A New Asian Food Hall Has Soft Opened Downtown

“Downtown is known to be kind of bland,” said Robert Cheng, owner of Golden Mall, when asked what customers could look forward to at the new Asian food court that has soft opened at 47 Broadway in FiDi. “We are bringing a lot more flavor.”

At the slender building between Broadway and Trinity Place, the bottom three floors house the new Golden Mall’s food court. There, customers can order platefuls of handmade noodles, fried chicken, Peking duck, and more. Or they can head up one flight of stairs to an arcade where sound effects from dozens of games ping pong about the air. On the top three floors? The mall is still scouting tenants for those—in particular, “after-hours friendly” businesses such as karaoke lounges or bars.

The original Flushing Golden Mall opened in 1990 as a no-frills, underground labyrinth of homestyle Chinese and Taiwanese eats. The Cheng family purchased it in 2000 and closed its doors in 2019 for what amounted to a four-year, $2 million renovation. Around the same time, they went looking for a second location to expand the business into Manhattan. They found the perfect spot in the building at 47 Broadway, which had long housed China Chalet, a dim-sum restaurant (slash notable nightclub) that eventually fell victim to the pandemic. They bought the entire building in 2022 for a whopping $12 million, double what it had sold for less than ten years’ prior.

Cheng told Straus that the original plan for Golden Mall FiDi was to bring back China Chalet, or another full-service Asian restaurant. But now, he said, a restaurant no longer seems like a viable option; the restaurant market is uncertain, a lot of establishments have shuttered in the last six months, and finding a tenant willing to commit may be too difficult.

Still, with its pan-Asian food court, Golden Mall FiDi will continue China Chalet’s legacy of serving Asian food in a neighborhood that, as Cheng put it, is not traditionally known for it. Cheng said there is more demand for Asian food in New York City than ever before; while Chinese takeout once sufficed to meet the Asian cuisine appetite for non-Asian customers, people want more variety now. Other recent openings support this conclusion; earlier this year, Hue House opened in Midtown as a cultural hub showcasing the cuisines of East and Southeast Asia, and there is far from a shortage of new Omakase spots around the city.

The floor at Golden Mall FiDi that was once China Chalet is now the first Manhattan location of the Brooklyn-based arcade Max Funland. There are many games, but what stands out is one machine New Yorkers do not see much of these days: Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). There are only two other DDR machines remaining in all of Manhattan, and this arcade is one of the first in the U.S. to have purchased the 2026 edition of the machine from Konami, the game’s Japanese manufacturer.

In July, although the mall had only just opened and the arcade was mostly empty, four dedicated gamers from the New York City DDR scene had already caught wind of this glitzy new machine and were queuing up to play. Later, David Ni, the arcade’s manager and co-owner, told Straus that while the arcade does not typically get much business during weekdays, these fans arrive when it opens at 1 p.m. and stay until closing. “They’re always standing outside of the door waiting for us to open.”

Ni did not have any clues for what tenants might move in upstairs, above the arcade.