NYC Secures $875,000 for Immigrant Restaurants Overcharged by HungryPanda App

HungryPanda, the delivery platform built around New York City's Chinese-speaking and Asian-diaspora restaurant communities, hid illegal fees inside its invoices under a label designed to sound routine: "promotion deductions." The disguise worked long enough to cost hundreds of immigrant-owned restaurants thousands of dollars each before city investigators caught it.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine, and Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su announced on April 8 that the city secured more than $875,000 from HungryPanda to resolve violations of NYC's Fee Cap Law, the first time the agency has ever enforced that law against a delivery app for overcharging restaurant owners. Of that total, more than $580,000 goes directly to over 380 restaurants as restitution, averaging roughly $1,526 per business, and more than $294,000 goes to the city as civil penalties.

The overcharges ran from January 2022 through September 2024, when pandemic-era rules capped third-party delivery fees at 23% of order revenue. DCWP found HungryPanda exceeded that cap using three interlocking tactics: bundling multiple fees into a single line item; relabeling fees so charges were hard to trace across billing periods; and disguising the excess as "promotion deductions," making illegal overcharges look like the cost of running a discount campaign.

"For so many restaurants and businesses, it is already hard enough to balance daily costs, labor, rent, equipment, utilities," Mamdani said. "Even harder, frankly, to stay afloat when a delivery platform steals hard-earned revenue." Deputy Mayor Su added that HungryPanda had counted on restaurant owners being too small and too busy to fight back.

Many of the affected restaurants were concentrated in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Flushing, Queens. These are two neighborhoods dense with the immigrant-owned food businesses that make up HungryPanda's core base in the city. As part of the settlement, HungryPanda is required to provide fee disclosures, implement compliance policies, and submit annual compliance certifications.

Any restaurant owner who used HungryPanda between January 2022 and September 2024 should pull their platform invoices from that window. Look for "promotion deduction" line items that don't correspond to a marketing campaign you actually agreed to run, fees bundled into a single charge without itemization, and charges whose names shifted from one billing period to the next. Total fees exceeding 23% of monthly order revenue during that stretch are the clearest indicator of overbilling. Complaints can be filed directly with DCWP.

HungryPanda did not respond to a request for comment. This is the second time in three months the city has forced a payout from the platform. In January, HungryPanda joined a $5.1 million settlement with Uber Eats and Fantuan over minimum pay violations affecting nearly 50,000 delivery workers. Commissioner Levine framed the April settlement as a warning to any platform operating in New York: DCWP will not allow HungryPanda, or any other delivery app, to hide junk fees behind confusing receipts and opaque accounting.