Cha Kee

"Mission Chinese Food @ Cha Kee / Wednesday-Sunday, 5-10pm; Ends July 31 Danny Bowien’s beloved San Francisco import is back for a spring and summer pop-up, after their drama-filled closure in 2022. They’re setting up shop inside Cha Kee at 43 Mott Street through July, serving classics from the original 2010 menu—think kung pao pastrami, mapo tofu, and thrice-cooked bacon. Follow Cha Kee’s IG for updates. " - neha talreja

"Places like Cha Kee (called 'a Beacon in Chinatown’s revival' by The New York Times)" - Cathy Erway

"Cha Kee offers soy milk braised romaine lettuce, a dish that balances the crunch of the stems with the sweetness of the leaves. The addition of scallion and chile oils with pumpkin seeds adds spice and texture." - Eater Staff

"Cha Kee in Chinatown offers dan dan noodles that combine minced pork, sesame sauce, ramen noodles, and a poached Japanese onsen egg. The noodles, rich and spicy, are transformed by mixing the yolk into the dish, offering a delightful combination of flavors and textures." - Eater Staff

"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