Hello, dear Pecking House supporters and friends.

So as you may have seen on our social, or maybe even in the news, there is a lot to update on Pecking House. Namely, that we’ve had to close the doors to our Prospect Heights location. Maybe for now, maybe forever. It’s been both a long time coming and incredibly unexpected. Such is life, and such is the nature of the world of food, especially these days.

So, what happened? As we mentioned on our last day open (May 9), we would share more of the story, and here it is – both simple and complicated. The simple side is that due to some mandated construction updates that affect our building and the two to our left, our landlord needed complete and full access to our basement. What we’ve got on our hands is a required sprinkler update that will mean taking out the current ceiling and installing new pipelines. While this update wasn’t required for our building when we opened in September 2022, it is now. And as you can guess, we can’t exactly prep our food down there while this is happening. So we moved out, and a construction team moved in for the foreseeable future.

But here’s the thing: Shutting down a restaurant, even temporarily, launches a domino effect that swiftly becomes an avalanche. You’ve got to pause everything, from the food and packaged goods supplies down to the ice machine and the linens. It takes time and a lot of coordination – and a lot of money – to both end and start again all the things that keep a restaurant churning. And most importantly, we have an incredible team that keeps our Pecking House world going round every single day. And they can’t just pause paying bills and supporting themselves and their families for an unknown amount of time. We simply can’t leave 25 people with no timeline, no pay, and no plan.

So this is where it gets complicated. We could place our bets on reopening a month or two down the line – if we’re lucky and this massive construction project doesn’t unearth other problems – and getting everything up and running again. All the vendors, all the supplies, all the food, all the tech, all the systems. But then we’d most likely have to find an entirely new team, because we want our current team to have found something stable and consistent for themselves in the meantime. And a new team will require a massive amount of training.

It’s a lot.

And the reality is, we’ve been thinking about our next steps in Prospect Heights for a while. We absolutely love Brooklyn – it’s our first brick-and-mortar home for ourselves – and we are so proud of what we’ve accomplished since 2022. And to every single person who has come through our doors and supported us, thank you. But the world has changed a lot. Prices are in flux (almost $1 an egg wholesale, anyone?); remote work, social media, and other factors have changed consumer behavior around restaurants; and the city itself is evolving a great deal.

So here we are, temporarily closed. But as you may be able to read between the lines, temporary is very up in the air. And while we’re incredibly sad at that prospect, we’re also grateful for everything we’ve already accomplished. We’re grateful for the amazing team who have made this restaurant what it is, many of whom have been with us since we started the first pop up in Queens. And we’re grateful for the experience and the lessons learned. There have been many of those, and we’re already carrying them with us in thinking about what comes next.

We’ll be focusing on our Chinatown spot. We’ll be closing our doors in Chinatown for a couple days (Wednesday, May 21, and Thursday, May 22) to train and launch a new menu. Come check us out starting Friday, May 23. There are going to be some really exciting changes. The Sichuan Chili Fried Chicken and some other signatures are staying – that is our soul and is never leaving. But we’re diving into what’s at the bottom of this vat of deep red chili oil and getting back to how and why we started this whole thing in 2020.

It’s going to be something we’re beyond proud of. We hope to see you there.

Maybe there are still a lot of questions, but we’re still figuring out a lot of answers. We will keep you updated as we figure them out. We’ll be hanging at Chinatown a lot in the coming weeks – you can always ask us there.

Lastly, we just want to end on once again thanking the incredible team that has made Pecking House everything that it is. Thank you for keeping the hospitality, the food, and the love a priority even when the tickets were flying. And thank you to everyone coming to Chinatown to keep that spirit going.

Thank you, Brooklyn – we really love you. And we’ll be seeing you, Chinatown.

With love,

The Pecking House team