Cha Kee – Chinatown's two-language kitchen on Mott Street

On Mott Street, two doors from the unmarked door that leads down into Basement, Cha Kee serves a menu that treats fusion as method rather than decoration. The Chinatown restaurant, which debuted in 2021 with a Japanese-influenced Chinese menu at 43 Mott Street, at Bayard Street, built its name on dishes that run two cuisines through a single kitchen without flattening either: dan dan noodles finished with an onsen egg over a bed of ramen noodles, and sweet and sour pork jowl and belly standing in for the neighbourhood's honey-roasted char siu. Executive Chef Akiko Thurnauer, who trained in the kitchens of Nobu Tribeca and En Japanese Brasserie before helping shape Danny Bowien's Mission Chinese Food, runs a dining room strung with hundreds of coloured paper lanterns and lit by an open kitchen. Cha Kee is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognition for a Chinatown kitchen that never set out to be fine dining, and a meal here remains, by the Guide's own measure, a moderate spend.

01The room and the setting

The dining room runs to 52 seats, with a kitchen-side banquette at the back offering roughly half a dozen places where the pass is visible and the two kitchen languages overlap. In the back of the 52-seat dining room, roughly a half-dozen seats at the kitchen-side banquet offer a front-row seat to pan-Asian cultural exchange, where Thurnauer might communicate to her chefs in a flurry of Japanese, while the Chinese chefs discuss the composition of their sauces in Cantonese, with neither team speaking each other's language, or English, fluently, but somehow coming together to make it work. Overhead, hundreds of paper lanterns in reds, pinks and golds give the room its colour, a motif the restaurant leans on in its own marketing as much as in person.

Cha Kee shares its ownership, and its address block, with Basement, the speakeasy bar next door; the restaurant's own site describes the two as run by the same team, with Cha Kee positioned as the Japanese-accented Cantonese half of the pairing. The project's founder, previously behind Sai Gon Dep in Murray Hill, opened Cha Kee as the first in a run of restaurants launched during the pandemic. Fong, who had previously opened Sai Gon Dep in Murray Hill, is launching the first of multiple restaurants during a pandemic.

02The chef

Akiko Thurnauer arrived at Cha Kee's stoves with a resume built across two very different Chinatowns of flavour. Executive chef Akiko Thurnauer (formerly of Mission Chinese, En Japanese Brasserie, Nobu Tribeca), crafted an interesting menu, far from the classic Chinese cuisine you usually find: no vegetarian dumplings or scallion pancakes. For six days a week she is the one shaping the kitchen's identity. For six days a week, the former graphic designer is the executive chef of Cha Kee in Manhattan's Chinatown, where she puts together innovative Japanese-influenced Cantonese dishes.

Insider tip

Selected in the MICHELIN Guide; moderate spend; no liquor licence, mocktails instead.

Her signature move is to take a dish she perfected elsewhere and let it carry over into Cha Kee's register: the soy milk-braised lettuce began as a riff on softened napa cabbage from her time in Danny Bowien's kitchen. At Cha Kee, which opened in September, her soy milk-braised lettuce, a nod to a dish of napa cabbage softened in soy milk, which she perfected in the kitchen of Danny Bowien's Mission Chinese Food, has turned skeptics of cooked lettuce into converts. Elsewhere on the menu, bone marrow ramen, curry puffs and a chile-lemongrass branzino show the same instinct for taking a familiar format and rerouting it. Cha Kee, with its stylish interiors and Thurnauer's own creative interpretations of bone marrow ramen, curry puffs, and chile-lemongrass branzino, is just one of many reasons beckoning New Yorkers back to Chinatown these days.

03The cooking

The kitchen's best-known plate takes a Sichuanese standard and sends it through a Japanese filter. The dan dan noodles take two of the Sichuanese dish's signature ingredients, minced pork and spicy sauce, and places them between two Japanese staples: A bed of ramen noodles and an onsen egg. A second anchor dish works the same trick on a Cantonese classic: another signature dish is sweet and sour pork jowl and belly, a creative take of cha Chiu (Cantonese honey-roasted loin).

Vegetable cooking gets the same attention as the meat. The smashed cucumber arrives dressed with shio kombu, and the honey walnut cauliflower has become one of the kitchen's quiet triumphs, crisp, creamy and sweet in roughly equal measure, while the fried rice folds in wood ear mushroom, oyster mushroom and shiso under a scattering of ume. On the vegan side of the menu, Thurnauer revisits her own history directly: Thurnauer recreates her own history in New York with an updated version of the tiger salad that she once made at Mission Chinese, one of several vegan dishes on the menu.

04What to order

Start with the dan dan noodles, minced pork and sesame sauce under ramen noodles and that onsen egg, and the smashed cucumber with shio kombu for the table. The sweet and sour pork jowl and belly is the dish to order if only one main is going on the table; the honey walnut cauliflower is the one worth ordering even if vegetables were not the plan for the evening. For something lighter, the ume and wood ear mushroom fried rice, built on oyster mushroom, egg and shiso, reads as comfort food with a second accent layered underneath it.

05Drinks

Cha Kee does not pour from a conventional bar list; without a liquor licence, the drinks programme leans instead on a genuinely considered mocktail menu, built around things like a ginger-and-rosemary highball rather than an afterthought soda. It is a detail that fits the kitchen's approach generally: a format borrowed from one tradition and made to work seriously within another.

06The neighbourhood

Cha Kee sits on the block of Mott Street that has carried Chinatown's commerce since the nineteenth century. It is regarded as Chinatown's unofficial "Main Street". The street's Chinese history runs back further still: in 1872, Wo Kee, a Chinese merchant, opened a general store on Mott Street near Pell Street. Basement, the speakeasy run by the same ownership, sits immediately next door, and the pairing of a daytime-into-dinner restaurant with a late bar is part of why the block has become one of the more watched stretches of the neighbourhood's recent comeback.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.