On Sunday, businesses in London’s Chinatown will welcome more than 300,000 visitors for the first lunar new year parade since the end of Covid-19 restrictions.
The restaurants, cafés and supermarkets in the narrow area around Gerrard Street are hoping the year of the rabbit brings them better luck after a bruising period for the London home of Chinese culture.
“The lockdown was painful; businesses could hardly survive,” said Lawrence Lee, from the London Chinatown Chinese Association, which helps organise the festive parade.
Even before the pandemic, business leaders can remember trade starting to be affected by — in the words of Adam Hug, leader of Westminster City Council — “a degree of misdirected criticism and misinformation” caused by rumours around the origins of the disease.
Geoff Leong, who runs Dumplings’ Legend and Leong’s Legend, said the area was seen as “very negative at that time . . . there was a lot of prejudice that initially came about”.
Florence Mae Maglanoc, who owns several Filipino-inspired outlets, including Mamasons ice cream parlour, said the early spread of the pandemic “really affected Chinatown and affected us as a business here”.
Within weeks of the disease being reported in early 2020, the area’s restaurants and bars — as with the rest of the UK — were forced into months of financially ruinous lockdowns.
But trade is now returning to near pre-pandemic levels, according to Maglanoc, while Leong’s restaurants are back to normal service.
On a cold Wednesday lunchtime this week, restaurants were bustling. “No one is afraid of a crowd anymore,” Maglanoc said. “We’re definitely in a recovery stage right now. People have missed being able to come to the street.”
The nearby SeeWoo supermarket was also busy with people stocking up for new year celebrations: dumplings that resemble silver ingots for wealth; whole fish (its Chinese name is a homophone for “surplus”); long noodles for long life; and glutinous rice balls to signify the togetherness of families.
And, perhaps most importantly for many children, the red envelopes into which money will be stuffed.
Lucy Mitchell owner of SeeWoo, inherited it from her father, Stanley Kwai Tsun Tse, who passed away last year. As head of the Chinatown association, he had helped make the parade — which has been suspended for the past two years — into a national celebration.
He also had a claim to have brought pak choi to the UK as a common vegetable after he opened his supermarket in 1975.
SeeWoo now manufactures and supplies businesses around the UK as well as its shop customers. “When the restaurants are busy, we are busy,” said Mitchell.
This recovery has been supported by returning East Asian students, who often visit Chinatown, according to both Mitchell and Leong, looking for food from their home countries.
Lee said: “In the last eight months, business has started to come back because of the tourists coming back. We have reached pre-Covid levels.”
Leong, whose family have run Chinese restaurants for several decades since moving from Hong Kong, said the area was able to quickly attract customers after the end of the lockdown in 2021.
He pointed to the breadth of food on offer and its importance in the ecosystem of the West End. “There isn’t a place like this anywhere in the world. You don’t even get this diversity in Hong Kong.”
“With characteristic energy and resilience, the Chinese community has reinvigorated itself and the area is now as buzzy and packed as before,” added Hug, of Westminster council.
Unusually for central London, the majority of businesses in the area are independently owned, and often passed down generations of families.
Chinatown was once dominated by Cantonese cuisine — mixed with options designed for its European clientele — reflecting the origins of many restaurateurs from Hong Kong during the era of British colonial rule.
But over the past two decades, the mix of restaurants has diversified, with regional Chinese options alongside a vast array of Asian food from countries such as Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
Jay Sim, who helps run Rasa Sayang, which opened 14 years ago to serve food from Malaysia and Singapore, said that it took time for Chinatown to get back on its feet.
But now, he said, sales were higher than pre-pandemic, with domestic tourism back strongly even if the number of mainland Chinese visitors were still lower.
Business owners said they hope the recent relaxation of China’s zero-Covid policy will bring back a source of crucial overseas clientele. However, they said they are unlikely to see numbers increase in time for new year.
“We’re definitely starting to see tourism come in a bit more. China has just allowed people as well to leave. And that’s going to help,” said Maglanoc.
Businesses are also optimistic about how they will fare during a recession given an often lower cost for much of the food sold in Chinatown
However, some warned that profit margins were under pressure given rising costs. “Everything has gone up, the food costs and the wages. So even though the business is back, the profit margin is not as many don’t want to put up prices,” said Lee.
Events such as the new year’s parade help remind people what Chinatown offers, said Mitchell. The celebration holds a special place for her, having grown up watching it get bigger from a ringside seat in the window of father’s store as a child.
The parade’s lion dance traditionally brings good fortune for the year ahead, and with the reopening of China and resurgence in West End visitors, local businesses are hopeful of prospering even in the event of a recession.
“This is a big celebration of Chinatown,” said Leong. “A time to gather around with family members and to really enjoy the sense of going out again.”
