Red Hook Restaurant the Excellent Fork Will Reopen Briefly as a Chinese-American Pop-Up

Red Hook staple the Good Fork is coming back again to lifetime. The community fixture, which forever shut its doors previous summer months, is reopening on March 4 to provide as a momentary pop-up room for 30-12 months-previous chef Leland Yu, a previous Superior Fork personnel who will be working Chinese-American pop-up Mr. Lee’s out of the beloved locale.

The pop-up, which will run for the subsequent two months, showcases a combine of Chinese and Chinese-American foods that Yu grew up taking in all over Manhattan’s Chinatown. “It’s heading to be a mix of the Chinese foods that my dad and mom and grandparents produced, and some points are likely to be more American-Chinese takeout fashion,” Yu claims.

The organic hen soup is a person of the far more common Chinese objects that Yu wished to bring to Mr. Lee’s menu. “In a large amount of Asian households, you may well have a mother or father or a grandparent at the stove all evening, babying their soup,” Lu says. “The organic, hen-y odor will be in the residence all evening, steaming up the windows.” At Mr. Lee’s, the aromatic rooster soup is brewed with cloud ear mushrooms and lily buds.

Conversely, dishes like the roasted Brussels sprouts and carrots paired with a sweet plum sauce give a glimpse into Yu’s variation of Chinese-American foods. “It’s familiar but various,” Yu states. Likewise, the oxtail and tendon fried rice is a “super beefed out” and “luxurious” version of the staple dish, he points out.

Courtesy of Leland Yu

Courtesy of Leland Yu

Yu beforehand labored for Great Fork owners Sohui Kim and Ben Schneider, initial at the duo’s Gowanus Korean restaurant Insa and then as a line cook at the Good Fork in 2019. He commenced out very last 12 months poised to enter the Fireplace Division of New York’s training academy — Yu has dreamed for years of getting a firefighter — but then the pandemic brought people programs to an abrupt halt.

Courtesy of Andy Ng

Rather, Yu catered private dinners to retain busy during the pandemic, and began jogging each day to train for a hopeful, eventual entry into the FDNY academy. Both ventures grew in unexpected methods: Immediately after witnessing the pandemic’s devastation in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Yu set together two fundraising operates that lifted about $50,000 in complete for local Chinatown charities, together with Welcome to Chinatown. And the non-public dinners delivered a welcome house to consider out dishes for Mr. Lee’s.

Now, Yu hopes to introduce Mr. Lee’s to a bigger client base through the Very good Fork pop-up. Inevitably, he aims to stability each goals of getting to be a restaurateur and a firefighter in the town “at the exact time,” Yu states. “It’s heading to be a lot of perform but that is what I want to realize.”

Mr. Lee’s is open for takeout and shipping from Thursday to Sunday, 5 to 9:30 p.m. The menu is offered in this article and on-line orders can be placed below.

Courtesy of Andy Ng

Courtesy of Leland Yu