A good-looking, hip, slightly shy guy, Truman Lam is the one member of the third generation of Lams to work at Jing Fong. He went to N.Y.U. and then worked in investment banking, but when his parents took over Jing Fong from his grandfather, his mother asked him “to help modernize the computers and I got sucked in,” Truman recalls. “This is way more stressful than investment banking, where you worked maybe 60-plus hours, but the worst case scenario is you get fired,” he says, “We have 180 staff, 140 full time and if something happens, it’s you who fixes it.”

Image Truman Lam with his grandfather, Shui Ling Lam, at the original Jing Fong in 1988. Credit... Courtesy of Jing Fong

The changing patterns of Chinese immigration to New York also worry Truman. The trend now, he notes, is for new Chinese arrivals to go to Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Flushing in Queens, rather than Manhattan. And there are hard-core foodies who insist there are dim sum joints in the boroughs as good as or better than those around Elizabeth Street, but Truman is a steadfast Manhattanite who rides his bike to work from his home in Battery Park City. (Jing Fong now has a location on the Upper West Side, too.)

I’ve been eating in Manhattan’s Chinatown all my life. For me, it’s about strolling, as we did when I was a kid, from the Jewish neighborhood (lox, knishes) to the Italian (Mozzarella, cannoli) then to Chinatown; to me, dim sum is best eaten with family and a load of friends sprinkled with soy sauce. Of the great 20th-century ethnic neighborhoods, Chinatown is the only one that has really grown over the years. Plunge down Bayard and Pell Streets, buy a bag of fresh lychees and you feel you have left the country, what the French call dépaysement.