Wo Hop’s Lunar New Year T-Shirts Are a Coveted Collector’s Item

Some go to Wo Hop, a basement-level Chinese restaurant on Mott Street in Lower Manhattan, for spare ribs and duck lo mein; others go for a seasonal T-shirt. The restaurant has offered Lunar New Year shirts since 2012, selling them for a few months each year, roughly from mid-January through mid-April.

This year’s design for the Year of the Horse shows a panda astride a horse and lassoing it with a noodle; last year’s featured a snake coiled around a takeout box of noodles. Shirts sell for $15 at Wo Hop and $25 online, and resale prices are slightly higher. About 2,700 shirts were sold in 2025, up from about 2,300 in 2024; David Leung ordered an initial run of 2,400 this year and expects to order 500 more, saying the merchandise is more promotion than profit.

The whimsical designs have been drawn since 2018 by Chelsea Leung, a fourth-generation member of the founding family, who made her first motif at 13—a smiling pig surrounded by fortune cookies for the Year of the Pig.

United States, Lower Manhattan

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