Urban Hawker, the Singaporean food hall that Anthony Bourdain helped dream up and food critic, host, and writer K.F. Seetoh brought to life in Midtown, will close Friday, July 17. The building at 135 West 50th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, has been sold for redevelopment, ending what the folks at the Hainan Jones stall called “a great four-year run” in their Instagram post.
The hall opened in September 2022 with over 15 stalls partly assembled by Seetoh, who developed ideas for the hall with Bourdain at the World Street Food Congress in Singapore nearly a decade earlier, years before Bourdain’s death. Urbanspace partnered with Seetoh on the project, which brought over 10 chefs from Singapore to operate the stalls on two levels running from 50th to 51st streets.
The hall also made news for a different reason: Seetoh posted on Instagram that Urban Hawker stalls would hire migrants being bused into the city from Texas as New York scrambled to house thousands of newly arrived migrants in emergency shelters and hotels…