Little Alley – Shanghai's Long Tang, Rebuilt on Third Avenue

Little Alley occupies a corner of Third Avenue in Murray Hill, a Shanghainese dining room built on a single, stubborn idea: recreate the food of a vanishing Shanghai neighbourhood rather than compromise it for Manhattan. Chef Yuchun Cheung, born into a family of chefs and restaurateurs in one of Shanghai's own little alleys, opened the restaurant on 21 June 2017, leading a kitchen staffed entirely by Shanghainese cooks determined to cook the dishes he grew up eating at home. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the guide's distinction for good quality, good value cooking. In a stretch of Manhattan built more for office lunches than culinary pilgrimage, Little Alley has become the address locals point to when homesick for Shanghai: a place for red-stewed pork, soup dumplings in several varieties, and a cocktail list that borrows its names from old Chinese film and song titles.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant sits between 36th and 37th Streets, a short stretch most New Yorkers would otherwise walk past without a glance. A wooden structure at the door, built to recall a red London phone box and scrawled with Chinese characters, signals that something different is happening inside before a single dish arrives. The dining room itself was designed to carry a nostalgic ambience resembling that of an old long tang, Cheung's way of folding the brick-walled alley of his Shanghai childhood into a Murray Hill street corner.

02The chef

Cheung was born in Shanghai in the 1980s, when, in his own words, "instead of skyscrapers, long tang were everywhere," and he has said the dishes on his menu trace straight back to that childhood and to a family of chefs and restaurateurs. Before opening Little Alley, he worked the kitchens of Shanghai's well-known Quanjude restaurant and New York's China Blue in Tribeca, training that still shows in how the kitchen handles Shanghainese red stewing: heavily seasoned proteins browned, then cooked low and slow for several hours. Cheung points to Dong Po Pork, a layered pork belly dish, and to his own version of Lion's Head, the classic pork meatball, as the two dishes that show the technique best — the latter hiding a salted duck egg at its centre for extra texture, a touch he is confident enough in to say, "I don't think anyone can make Lion's Head like this."

Insider tip

Open nightly; lunch specials Mon–Fri; book by phone or via the restaurant's own site.

03The cooking

Dim sum is where the kitchen's craft shows most plainly. The Shanghainese-style shu mai starts from the traditional base of sticky rice and Chinese sausage, but the kitchen adds bamboo shoot, shiitake mushroom and oyster oil to the mix. The dim sum list also runs to soup dumplings in several varieties, radish puffs, vegetable potstickers and more shu mai, while the kaofu — a cold, nutty wheat-gluten starter — is made here with almonds rather than the more usual peanuts or cashews. On the vegetable side, the kitchen turns out rainbow mushrooms with peppers and cashews in oyster sauce, braised tofu with crab meat, and stir-fried Shanghai noodles and rice cakes.

04What to order

Beyond the soup dumplings the restaurant describes on its own site as its signature, a working order at Little Alley tends to run to Chinese sausage fried rice, scallion pancakes, oxtail soup, beef dumplings, pan-fried pork buns, potstickers, rice-wine dumplings, Shanghai rice cake and the delicate capsella flower. Around Lunar New Year, the kitchen runs a short seasonal menu with giant oysters in garlic and chopped chili, Dungeness crab with salted duck egg, lobster with ginger and scallion, and a braised pork shank served with bok choy — worth asking for if visiting in early February.

05Wine and drinks

The cocktail list reads like a playlist of old Chinese film and song titles: Shanghai 1943, built on pear vodka, lime and rosemary; Wound of War, a bourbon-rum-gin blend finished with lime; and Wife, a hot drink of spiced rum, Earl Grey tea and osmanthus honey, garnished with lemon. A short classic list covers a Manhattan, a Martini and a Negroni, alongside Chinese and Hong Kong craft beers such as an oolong lager and a jasmine-tea lager. The wine list skews small and curious rather than blue-chip: a Basque cider from Zubieta, a cool-climate Rioja Alavesa red, and an orange wine from Slovenia's Vipava Valley made with 365 days of skin contact.

06When to go and booking

Little Alley is open Sunday to Thursday from 11am to 2:45pm and 5pm to 9:15pm, and Friday and Saturday until 9:45pm, with a lunch special served Monday to Friday between 11am and 3pm.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.