Rumors

There have been a lot of stories told about Hop Sing Laundromat and its owner/operator/inventor/driving force, the singularly-named Lêe. Some of them are true (yeah, free shoe shines) and some of them are not (no, it’s not going to be open in April, or probably May either, and no, there is not going to be a secret entrance), but all of them have been bouncing around the interweb for months now as Philly’s food writers, cocktail fiends, real estate speculators, Chinatown watchers and lovers of modern mysteries have traded them like bubblegum cards–hoping that the strangest of them will be true, worrying that none of us will ever know for sure as potential opening dates have whistled by seemingly unnoticed by Lêe himself.

My favorite of all the rumors? The thing about the bar–that a month or so ago, with his 40-foot, custom-designed bar already roughed out, wired and piped, he dropped by the space late one night and decided that it was all wrong. The whole thing needed to be moved to the other side of the room, completely torn out and rebuilt. That one turned out to be true.

But, of course, I didn’t know the whole story.

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