YingTao – the cherry-named star of Chinese fine dining in NYC

On Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, YingTao opened in December 2023 as an unusually personal project. Husband-and-wife team Bolun and Linette Yao, both first-time restaurateurs, self-funded a contemporary Chinese tasting-menu restaurant named for Bolun's late grandmother – yingtao means cherry in Mandarin, and the colour recurs through the room as a quiet tribute to her. Within its first year the restaurant had done something no other Chinese kitchen in the city could claim: it holds one MICHELIN Star, making it the only Chinese tasting-menu restaurant in New York to carry the distinction. Run under the Yaos' own August Hospitality Group, YingTao treats Chinese cuisine not as a fixed, traditional category but as a living, evolving one, built course by course into a seven-dish tasting menu now led by executive chef Emily Yuen, who joined the kitchen in February 2026 after a career spanning Melbourne, London, Singapore and New York.

01The room and the setting

The name is the starting point for everything else here. The restaurant’s name pays homage to Bolun Yao’s late grandmother, and the cherry-red design accents subtly reflect her memory and the cultural symbolism of the fruit. The room sits on 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, the dense restaurant strip west of the Theater District, where Yingtao is a contemporary Chinese fine-dining restaurant named after Bolun Yao's grandmother.

Guests who prefer a more informal seat can take the bar: if you're sitting at the bar, you can order à la carte from the same menu. Bolun and Linette Yao financed the project themselves, without outside investors, and rank among the city's youngest MICHELIN-Starred operators.

02The chef

Emily Yuen, a Vancouver native, became executive chef of Yingtao in February 2026, after competing on Padma Lakshmi's CBS cooking competition America's Culinary Cup. Her path there was anything but direct: she cooked in acclaimed fine-dining restaurants around the world, from Vue de Monde in Melbourne and the Michelin-starred Le Gavroche in London to db Bistro & Oyster Bar in Singapore, before moving to New York, where she worked at Boulud Sud and the Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant Kajitsu.

Insider tip

Closed Mondays; book ahead for the seven-course $150 tasting menu.

From there she served as Executive Chef at Bessou in NoHo and most recently opened Lingo in Brooklyn in 2023, a Japanese American concept that blends familiar flavors with inventive, globally inspired twists; her work at Lingo earned the restaurant a place in the Michelin Guide, and she was named a 2025 James Beard Foundation Best Chef: New York State semifinalist. At Yingtao, as a mother, she is deeply motivated by the example she sets for her daughter – her career is not only an expression of her craft, but a testament to the possibility of building a life around one's passion.

03The cooking

The kitchen's approach is written into the menu itself: the menu, developed by Chef Emily Yuen, is a creative, multi-course tasting experience that reimagines Chinese flavors, techniques, and culinary traditions through a modern fine-dining lens, reflecting Chinese food not as a traditional, fixed category, but as a progressive, evolving cuisine.

The format is fixed, the contents are not: the seven-course tasting menu runs $150 per person and changes seasonally.

04What to order

A recent iteration of the tasting menu moved through hamachi with watermelon radish, celtuce and asian pear; a lo mai gai of sticky rice, lap cheong and salted duck yolk; wontons of berkshire pork, tiger prawn and goji in superior stock; black cod with silken tofu, doubanjiang and suan cai; plum duck with kumquat, honey and jujube; a mandarin jelly with puerh tea and osmanthus; and nian gao with walnut, coconut and lime.

The lo mai gai is a particular piece of craft: a deboned chicken wing stuffed with sticky rice, lap cheong, and salted duck yolk.

05Wine and drinks

The bar programme echoes the kitchen's instinct for reinvented heritage flavours: the Yingtao Sour pairs cherry and rose cardamom tea with egg white, while Her Name is Jade combines jasmine gin with osmanthus and yuzu.

Beyond the cocktail list, the baijiu program, with pours available across three foundational aroma styles, or as a guided flight, is rare for New York. A separate wine list is also available on request.

06When to go and booking

YingTao is closed on Mondays; it seats Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday from 5pm to 8:30pm, and Friday and Saturday from 5pm to 9:30pm, with the reservations line answering calls Tuesday to Sunday between 2pm and 5pm. The address is 805 9th Avenue, in Hell's Kitchen, New York, NY 10019 – and, for now, it remains the only MICHELIN-Starred Chinese tasting menu restaurant in New York City.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.