Winnie's

Before she ran a karaoke bar, Winnie Mui had a brief but illustrious career as a Cantonese opera star in Hong Kong¹. She opened Winnie's at 104 Bayard Street in 1987, and it stayed a Chinatown staple for 28 years^{1, 2}.

Its DJs juggled requests scrawled on slips of scrap paper, a complicated-looking filing system of laserdiscs, hand-written location notes and several laserdisc players¹. Our old listing called it a people watcher's dream, and on weekends the crowd bore that out: Chinatown old-timers shared the stage with artist types and hipsters¹.

In February 2015 Time Out reported that the bar would shut at the end of March, and that the landlord would rent the space to a tenant yet to be named². The lease was expiring, and that March Winnie's was forced to close¹.

Dr. Clark is at 104 Bayard Street now³. In 2019, four years after the closing, the bar finally found a new home on East Broadway¹. It's at 58 East Broadway, with no private rooms, just a few vinyl booths, which is good news for people watchers⁴.