The Chinatown Guy Selling Shrimp As Pets!
Plus! Tweet of the Week!! Items of Interest!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #199 of CAFÉ ANNE!
So last week, after I wrote about my skin care experiment and included some before-and-after photos that seemed to show improvement, readers suggested there may have been other factors at play.
Referring to a second story in the issue, about my trip to Jollibee, the Filipino fast food chain, reader Lucy C. wrote, “I’m no scientist, but how do we know your vibrant skin is a result of the supplements, and not the banana ketchup?”
Referring to a third story in the issue, the results of the CAFÉ ANNE powdered caffeine recipe contest, reader Amac was one of several to suggest, “Have you considered your skin is looking radiant from all the caffeine?”
My guess: I am looking radiant because, for a second week in a row, I got so many new paid subscriptions! Huge banana ketchup shoutouts to new supporters Asta K., Megan, Andrea I., Tony, Vicky M., Paul J., Zachary F., Eric C., Parry C., Mary M., and Cynthia B.! That’s enough $$$ for 40 more lunches at Jollibee! Not that I plan to go back.
Since I started bugging you all for money a couple weeks ago, btw, the percentage of subscribers who are paying for this free newsletter has jumped from 2.3% to 2.5%. As I mentioned, I need about 5% to keep this thing going. But this is a very good start!
If you’ve been holding back in a charming fashion, I see you. Please join the 5% club! The rewards—including a surprise item in the mail— are unbelievable.
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a visit with entrepreneur Andy Yeung in his Chinatown store, selling shrimp as pets. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
PS Next week is the 200th issue of CAFÉ ANNE, and it’s going to be doozy. I am so excited!
TWEET OF THE WEEK
DEPT. OF COMPANION CRUSTACEANS
The Chinatown Guy Selling Shrimp As Pets!
In Chinatown, down a flight of stairs beneath the Mango Mango dessert shop, there’s a tiny store selling shrimp as pets.
My new hero: Andy Yeung, a former waiter who was so obsessed with his shrimp-keeping hobby that he opened his own shop, Aquatics for Fun, in the neighborhood where he grew up.
I first learned about Andy a few weeks ago, thanks to an email from reader Ana R. in Prospect Heights.
“The owner is a NYC native—he grew up in Chinatown and is really into tiny shrimp,” Ana wrote. “He sells them in quantities like 33 for $18. He has a whole tank for something called water fleas that are pretty much invisible. He’s a great guy to talk to and has a lot to say about all the fish—he’s really living up to the store’s name.”
I’m glad Ana mentioned that the store was located down a flight of stairs, or I might have missed it when I stopped by last week. The Aquatics For Fun entrance is ten steps below sidewalk level, tucked under another store.
And inside, no Andy! Instead I met his wife, Amy Lei. Filling in for her husband behind the counter of the narrow, fluorescent-lit shop, she said her husband was home sick with food poisoning.
And she couldn’t tell me much about the business, beyond the fact that until it opened last October, their tiny apartment was packed to the gills with Andy’s shrimp tanks. “It was one tank, and then two and three, and then it kept going, and we had more than ten tanks!” she said.
Amy was kind enough to put her husband on FaceTime, however, and after chatting a bit, Andy announced he was feeling better. Their apartment is just a couple blocks away, so minutes later he was at the store, telling me all about the world of pet shrimp!
Folks have kept shrimp for pets for as long as they’ve kept pet fish, the soft-spoken shopkeeper told me. But the hobby never gained much traction because there were only two basic kinds available—red shrimp and clear shrimp. Then, roughly ten years ago, a handful of breeders in Taiwan started creating new varieties with different patterns and colors. “Yellow, green, blue, orange,” said Andy. “It really blew up!”
The tiny new exotics were fetching as much as $1000. Then, as more breeders got in on the game, prices plummeted. The shrimp in Andy’s shop, available in a wide range of colors, typically cost $4 to $8. Customers get a discount for buying ten or more—which they really should, because there is nothing so sad as a lonely shrimp.
Shrimp breeders, meanwhile, are still creating new varieties. Across Asia, the industry is booming, with thousands of shrimp-crazed hobbyists gathering at competitive shrimp shows, including the upcoming VietShrimp Aquaculture International Fair in Ho Chi Minh City.
And the scene is spreading. Here in the states, the shrimp crowd is gearing up for the Aquashella Aquarium Festival’s American Shrimp Contest next weekend in Orlando. It’s like the Westminster Dog Show, only a lot more antennae.
“What kind of person keeps a pet shrimp?” I asked.
The short answer: people who are lazy. Shrimp produce very little waste, Andy said, so you only need to clean their tank every three weeks—in contrast to the weekly tank cleaning demanded by fish.
“You could go on vacation for two weeks and not even worry about feeding them,” he continued. “You can throw in a bunch of leaves, and they’ll munch on it the whole time. If you did that with fish, you’d come back, they’d all be gone.”
But shrimp are just as much fun to watch, he said: “They’re just non-stop eating. Munching, munching, munching.”
“Are they smarter than they look?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “What you see is what you get.”
We headed to the back of the store where Andy keeps more than twenty tanks of shrimp including Golden Dragons, Extreme Blue Bolts and the white-striped Red Fancy Tigers.
I was disappointed to discover they’re just a half-inch long, but Andy said they can double in size. And they were still satisfyingly monstrous—bopping about and fluttering their transparent legs in a primitive arthropodic dance.
Andy pointed out the $7 Red Galaxy Stardust Mix. “If you look closely, each one has a different pattern,” he sighed happily.
There are dozens of aquatic hobby stores in NYC, and many occupy a niche—specializing in reef tanks or pricey exotics, for example. As far as Andy knows, his store is the first and only NYC shop specializing in shrimp.
It’s already creating a lot of first-time shrimp-keepers because the setup is easy. All you need is a big jar, a handful of gravel, moss, plants and shrimp. Perfect for a tiny NYC apartment. You can get started for about $50—less than you’d pay for a nice shrimp dinner!
The best part? Shrimp multiply like crazy. When AI takes your job, you can pivot into shrimp breeding. Andy said he would not mind the competition—more locals selling pet shrimp will just raise the hobby’s profile.
His biggest rival is Amazon. Yes, you can buy live shrimp from the world’s largest retailer, for a lower price. But then you’d miss out on chatting with Andy, who loves nothing more than talking shrimp. Which shows in his store’s Google rating. Since opening in October, he’s garnered 52 reviews with a perfect five-star average.
While we were chatting, he took a break to advise Rei, a customer from Crown Heights, on caring for her new pets. Rei kept a turtle for 22 years and when the turtle died, she didn’t know what to do with the tank. Her little brother, who is into aquariums, recommended Andy’s store.
“To me this place is the best,” she said. “The first time I came in, he talked to me for an hour and a half.”
And she’s very happy with her shrimp: “They’re so colorful and cute!”
Andy also sells fish, of course—he can’t survive on shrimp alone. But he’s focusing on small varieties such as tetras, guppies and mollies, constantly tweaking the selection based on sales. “Every tank, the fish have to pay their own rent,” he says. “If it’s slow-selling, I have to switch.” He also rotates varieties to ensure there’s something new for repeat customers.
It’s a lot of work! Andy has yet to hire help and hasn’t taken a day off since he opened the store, which operates seven days a week from 11 am to 7 pm. And he’s often at the shop until 10 pm cleaning tanks and shipping online orders, not to mention driving to JFK to pick up fresh stock arriving from Asia by cargo plane.
“New York City is so fast paced, especially for this hobby,” he said. “If you’re not open every day, the customers get so impatient. They want that fish, and if you’re not open, they go somewhere else.”
Before launching the store, Andy, who is 33, worked for more than a decade as a waiter, first at an East Village ramen shop and then at Dim Sum Palace in the Financial District.
“This is much better,” he said. “I’d rather do something I love. I don’t mind working seven days now, compared to five days. It’s not a job. I don’t think of myself as a business owner. I think of myself as a hobbyist. Before I opened the store, I had eight tanks at home!”
“Amy said it was ten,” I said.
Amy, who was listening in, nodded her head.
Andy conceded that there had probably been least ten large shrimp tanks crammed into the kitchen of the three-room, 400-square foot apartment the couple shares with their three children—a ten-year-old daughter and twin eight-year-old sons. He was also keeping tanks of fish in the apartment of his parents, immigrants from Hong Kong who live nearby.
Andy and Amy, a medical receptionist, both grew up in Chinatown; they met as high school students at a barbecue. They remember when the neighborhood was controlled by Chinese gangs and when Bayard Street—a lively strip now crammed with bubble tea and dessert shops—was dark and vacant.
Andy was introduced to aquariums at age twelve when his father brought home a fish tank. First it was guppies, then crayfish. It wasn’t until his late teens, on a visit to a Brooklyn, that he discovered his true love (besides Amy).
“It was the Crystal Red,” he said of his favorite shrimp variety. “I just fell in love with them.”
He keeps a personal tank of Crystal Reds at the front counter, “Just so I can look at them all the time,” he said. “It just calms me more than the other breeds of shrimp.”
He dreamed for years of opening a shop, but the pandemic made him hesitate. Last year, he started scouting locations. He chose his storefront on Bayard Street for its proximity to home and the low rent—less than $5,000 a month.
The basement location works fine, he said. Pet shops depend on destination shoppers and repeat customers rather than foot traffic. Folks who wander in on a lark—typically tourists exploring Chinatown—seldom leave with a new pet.
The hardest part was finding reliable suppliers. Many overseas wholesalers delivered stock that died within a few days. And when Andy finally settled on a reliable few and ordered what he thought was enough to stock his store, he discovered he’d vastly underestimated what he needed to fill the tanks. “I had to spend double my initial budget,” he said.
It was a risk. You can’t return an unsold shrimp! But all told, he only spent $40,000 of his waiter job savings to open the shop, which is by far the cheapest storefront startup figure I’ve heard in years.
And it’s paid off. Four months in, despite zero advertising, business is steady. Andy said he’s already breaking even on what may be the city’s strangest niche business.
And after years of sharing a home with thousands of shrimp, Andy’s family finally has the kitchen all to themselves.
“Last question,” I said. “How many tanks do you have in your apartment now?”
“None,” said Andy. “They’re all here.”
ITEMS OF INTEREST
A Deep Dive Into Butter Wrappers
Average Price of a Lemon in NYC
Call a Republican! Call a Democrat!
Girl Scounts Set Up Shop at NJ Weed Dispensory
CAFÉ ANNE, a free weekly newsletter about NYC, is created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
Sad there was no "shrimpire" in the copy but lovely to be introduced to Andy!
In case you find it hard to believe that one can talk about shrimp for hours, here’s a classic movie quote "Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. There's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it."