Looking for a place to eat on Christmas and New Year’s Day? — Chinatown restaurants may be your answer

Compiled by Haoyi Xu and Rosita Chan
Northwest Asian Weekly

Peking duck, Chinese-style steak, and Vietnamese sugarcane shrimp may be your best bet on Christmas Day as most restaurants will be closed. But not in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID).

If there’s one secret about the CID that outsiders don’t know, it would be that numerous restaurants and businesses do open on both Christmas and New Year’s Day. In fact, these two days are some of the busiest times of the year for CID restaurants. Traditionally, big parties including families and friends troll through those restaurants during the last week of the year.

“We never close,” Harry Chan, owner of Tai Tung Restaurant, once told me. “There are customers relying on us on these holidays.”

It’s true, not everyone has friends and family to dine with during those occasions. And if you don’t want to cook a big dinner because there are way too many guests joining you for the festive dinners, don’t sweat it. Just go to CID restaurants, and you don’t even need to clean up afterwards.

More than 30 CID restaurants are open on both holidays.

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