CheLi – Shanghai's Song Dynasty feast on St Marks Place

CheLi sits a few steps down from the pavement on St Marks Place in the East Village, a Shanghainese dining room that opened in November 2020 as the calmer, more theatrical sibling of Szechuan Mountain House next door, both run by the DaShan Restaurant Group. Where its neighbour trades in Sichuan heat, CheLi works the gentler, wine-steeped repertoire of the Jiangnan delta around Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou: soup dumplings, slow-braised pork belly, whole fish fragrant with Shaoxing wine. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the guide's distinction for good cooking at a moderate price, and the New York Times named it one of New York's most impressive Chinese restaurants in October 2021, then placed it among its 100 Best NYC Restaurants in both 2023 and 2024. A second CheLi operates across the river in Flushing, Queens, but it is this St Marks Place original, with its queue that forms most evenings, that put the kitchen on the map.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is built as a vintage floor plan representing an old village of southeastern China along the Yangtze River, with polished wood and marble carving out nooks and alleyways for guests to wander through as regional Chinese opera plays overhead. Paper lanterns hang low between sloping, curved-tile roofline details and shelves of clay vessels of the kind once used for fermenting rice wine, so that a table at the back feels genuinely separate from the street-level bustle of St Marks Place outside.

Even the menu plays along with the conceit: it is designed to resemble old Chinese census books, set in Shanghai-style calligraphy on imported paper. A trickling indoor waterfall and thatched-roof alcoves complete the sense of having walked into a riverside hamlet rather than a restaurant wedged between East Village bars.

02The chef

At the stoves is chef David Wang, who built the kitchen's identity around a wine-braising method rarely seen in New York, used to turn out pork and seafood dishes steeped in Shaoxing wine and goji berries. His wife, Fang Fang, runs the dessert side of the menu, producing the sculptural sweets - sticky rice pancakes, osmanthus rice cakes, walnut purée - that close most tables' meals.

Insider tip

Open daily from 11:30am; booking recommended given the nightly queue on St Marks Place.

03The cooking

The opening menu set out the kitchen's ambitions clearly, with dishes such as wine-soaked Atlantic blue crab, Qianlong's Favorite Eel, sea urchin egg tofu stew and steamed yellow croaker in wine sauce standing in deliberate contrast to the soup-dumpling-and-General-Tso's image many diners bring to Chinese restaurants. Today's menu, read on the restaurant's own site in October 2026, still runs to several pages split into Appetisers, Homemade Dim Sum, a Jiangnan-focused 'Jiang Nan Reminisce' section, 'Taste of Che Li' signatures, Vegetables, Rice & Noodles, Soup and Dessert - lengthy enough that asking the server for a regional steer is worthwhile before ordering.

04What to order

Start with the Wine Soaked Chicken, marinated in Chinese yellow wine and goji berries and served chilled, or the Crispy Smoked Fish scented with osmanthus. From the dim sum list, the Black Truffle Pork Soup Dumplings sit alongside the more traditional pork and crab-meat versions, and the vegan Song Dynasty Steamed Buns, served with a sweet osmanthus sauce, nod directly to the restaurant's banquet-era theme.

The signature Che Li's Pork Belly, braised with quail eggs, and the theatrical Flaming Beggar's Chicken - smoked, stuffed and wrapped in lotus leaves and flour clay before being cracked open at the table - are the dishes regulars order again and again. The Longjing Shrimp, poached and tossed through green tea sauce, and the Pickled Cabbage Fish Stew, built on chilli and Szechuan peppercorns despite the kitchen's otherwise Shanghainese focus, round out a table built for sharing.

05Wine and drinks

The drinks list leans unusually hard into Japanese sake for a Shanghainese dining room, with bottles running from Ippongi Ginkoubai Plum Sake by the glass up through Daiginjo-grade pours such as Dassai 23 and Kubota 'Senshin' Junmai, read on the restaurant's site in October 2026. A shorter international wine list ranges from Cava and Prosecco by the glass to a Santenay Premier Cru from Burgundy and a bottle of Opus One for special occasions, alongside house infusions such as milk tea with yellow wine and osmanthus rice wine, with or without alcohol.

06When to go and booking

CheLi's East Village dining room is open Sunday to Thursday from 11.30am to 10.30pm and Friday and Saturday from 11.30am to 11pm, according to the restaurant's site read in October 2026. Reservations can be made directly through che-li.com or by phone, and given the restaurant's reputation for a line out the door most evenings, booking ahead - or arriving right at opening - is the more comfortable route in.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.