"At Cha Kee, chef Akiko Thurnauer blends regional ingredients, techniques, and histories. Fong, who had previously opened Sai Gon Dep in Murray Hill, is launching the first of multiple restaurants during a pandemic. Despite all these variables, the Japanese-influenced Cantonese menu aspires to be a world unto itself, with the kind of ambitious cultural blending where multiple ingredients, techniques, and histories — global and personal — come together on a single plate in search of an entirely new identity. Anchoring the menu is a remixed version of sweet-and-sour pork that parts with tradition — even before the meat is cut. 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. 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. For the decidedly un-vegan, there’s mala jellyfish, mussels with aonori butter with a helping of fried mantou buns, and Macao curry chicken. 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." - Elisa Mala