On Wednesday morning, workers at Chinatown’s Nam Fong were racing to keep up with orders from a steady stream of customers wanting to place their final takeout orders from the Chinese meat shop before it closes on Sunday.
By 9 a.m., orders for the roast duck had a one-hour wait, and sold out for the day an hour later. Meanwhile, customers unable to wait placed advance orders to pick up on later days.
“This is really sad,” said Kailua resident Valerie Ako, who placed multiple orders at the shop this week after hearing about its impending closure. “Now I gotta try other places that have duck.”
While the shop’s most popular items include its roast duck and roast pork, it is also the only place in the state where you can purchase hand-roasted suckling pig, said Dominic Tsun, translating for his father, Dylan Tsun, the chef and owner of Nam Fong.
As customers approached the cash register to order, Dee Gu, Dylan’s girlfriend, expertly handled phone calls, took customer orders and packed them, while Shek Kin Lam, a friend of Dylan’s, chopped the meat fresh to order.
Dylan Tsun first opened Nam Fong in 1988 with the intention of supporting his growing family — a purpose which he said the shop has successfully served. It has also been a great source of joy knowing that customers are enthusiastic about the food he serves, Tsun said.
After about 35 years of business, Tsun began to feel the strenuous work take an increasing toll on him, and after several shoulder injuries, he began to sense the need to retire in January of this year, Dominic Tsun said.
In February, Dominic Tsun began taking time off from his work as a firefighter to help with the shop. And by June, Dylan Tsun finalized his decision and posted a written notice declaring the Sept. 24 closing date to customers, Dominic Tsun said.
Since then, word-of-mouth has spread the news of Nam Fong’s closing, with many customers on Wednesday saying that they’d heard about it from friends or family. Kakaako resident Brandon Soliven visited the shop Wednesday morning hoping to pick up roast duck, but left empty-handed after realizing it would be an hour wait.
“Usually, if I don’t have this kind of stuff for a long time, I’ll try to get some of everything,” Soliven said. “There’s a lot of foodies that I follow, so they’ve been telling customers.”
Although it’s sad to know that the shop will close, with the impacts of the pandemic, he said the news was not entirely surprising.
“The pandemic messed up the supply chain, you’re not making any more dough, interest rates are high and it’s almost impossible to make a profit margin,” Soliven said. “Initially, it’s sad. … But you see it with everything.”
Downtown resident Queenie Tse has been a regular customer at Nam Fong for the past 30 years, and said that she was also sad to hear it would be closing.
Meanwhile, Leeward resident Karen Goshi visited the shop on Wednesday for the second time this week trying to redeem her gift certificate for roast duck, and wound up redeeming it for the ginger chicken and char siu instead.
With retirement on the horizon, Dylan Tsu feels satisfied with the success of Nam Fong, and now looks forward to spending time traveling to places in Europe and Asia, he said.
“This place has served its purpose of raising his family,” Dominic Tsun said. “With me and my sister both married and grown, he said he feels like he’s worked enough. He’s good now.”
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Linsey Dower covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
