Meals Corridor China Dwell Received’t Be Coming to Seattle After All

It looks like COVID wrecked a major culinary venture that was about to hit Seattle. China Live – a sprawling Chinese food hall and market in San Francisco – was set to open a new outpost in downtown Seattle near the Amazon Spheres. After delaying opening until 2022, co-founder George Chen now says the company is completely shut down, largely due to uncertainty about how the pandemic will continue to affect the core of downtown.

“We’re not going to do Seattle,” Chen said on an upcoming episode of Eater’s Digest, noting that China Live signed a lease on Amazon’s AWS building a year and a half ago before COVID hit the area. “It’s not the right concept and location because, like any big secret company, Amazon won’t tell you whether or not their employees can work remotely.” He adds that it was a mutual decision with Amazon to end the lease and that the company got ahead of it last year.

China Live’s first plans, announced in February 2020, were to create full-service restaurants, bars, and shops in an area of ​​13,000 square feet at 2107 Westlake Avenue in 2021. Already in the early days of the pandemic Chen and his team tried to remain optimistic about continuing the project by delaying it for a year. Some of the concepts adapted at the time included areas where customers could order food from tablets or cell phones, less face-to-face contact, more retail opportunities, and pod-locked seating. In San Francisco, sales struggled during the peak California breakouts, despite the grocery hall making adjustments with more takeouts to stay afloat.

For those visiting downtown Seattle, the news is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. While Amazon has signaled that it would try to get most of its office workers back by fall, nothing is set in stone and that uncertainty is likely to be difficult to place an expensive bet on. According to Chen, China Live is instead looking for potential expansion plans in New York and Chicago.

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