A team of friends committed to preserving Chinatown’s legacy through its cultural cuisine is looking to open up an Asian concept at 85 Bowery.
The team including Cory Ng and Chef Zhan Chen, and a few others, are also behind the Lower East Side’s Potluck Club, where Cantonese cuisine takes on an American twist, and Milk and Cream Cereal Bar, a trendy ice cream concept that creatively uses cereals as toppings with locations in Manhattan, Queens and Jersey City. The new restaurant is unnamed but is slated to offer 33 tables with 66 seats and one bar.
Chef Chen’s menu proposals for the new concept include but are not limited to housemade scallion focaccia, scallion and radish rice noodle roll salad, shrimp and taro rolls, daikon croquettes, oyster mushroom rice roll noodles, black bean escargot with ginger scallion sauce, curry tofu and taro mash potatoes.
Ng and Chen grew up in Chinatown with fond memories going to the movie theater on Bowery Street as kids, which is why they strive to preserve their cultural legacy in town.
“There’s not any places that open in Chinatown. If anything, after the pandemic, a lot more closed than opened, and essentially we felt like there was a vacuum that needed to be filled,” Chen told ABC7 News. “Chinatown, some people will say, it’s aging out. That’s why we wanted to continue doing business here, creating new energy here.”
