Helen Rosners writes about Lei, in Chinatown, a wine bar with a few Chinese bites, from Annie Shi, of King and Jupiter.
A new establishment, Lei Wine, opened last June, right next door, and it serves as a potent counterpoint. Modern, sleek, restrained, Lei is the first solo project from the restaurateur Annie Shi, a partner in the chic European-inflected West Village restaurant King and its midtown sibling, Jupiter.
Shi, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Queens; she’s spoken about taking inspiration for Lei from her mother’s cooking and her father’s Chinatown social life. With mahogany wall panels and folktale-inspired murals, the restaurant evokes elements of traditional Chinese design, while its moody, candlelit interior and austere tableware place it firmly in the aesthetic of the here and now. High shelves run around the walls in the tiny, table-packed dining room, clustered with bottles from Shi’s meticulously curated wine list; if a customer requests a bottle that’s out of reach, a server might grab a ladder that rests against the wall by the door—fire-engine red, the brightest shock of color in the otherwise low-key room—and climb nimbly over diners’ heads. Lei’s menu is brief and tight, featuring mostly snack-size dishes, both chilled and warm, and two or three larger plates that, while still relatively petite, flirt with the notion of a main course. It is unmistakably Chinese in approach and ingredients, if not necessarily traditionalist in its execution. The kitchen seems to operate on ambitious principles of beauty and control. The presentation is starkly, artistically minimalist: three tiny bowls of pickles ; a precise triangle of aged-daikon omelette. Raw celtuce, a lettuce cultivar bred for its sweet stem rather than for its leaves, is cut into neat rectangles of a luminous parakeet green, interleaved with strips of jiggly kombu jelly, and plated atop a vermillion pool of Yongchun red vinegar. An ovoid shao bing—a flaky laminated pastry freckled with sesame seeds—provides a sharp contrast in temperatures: the bun is oven-hot and puffy with steam, the thick slab of butter tucked inside still fridge cold. You can, if you like, get a side of cured lardo, ethereal slivers laid out on a white plate, but the logic of the pairing eludes me: the oily bing and milky slick of butter already form a symphony of richness, and I was happier to eat the lardo on its own, letting each translucent fairy wing of fat melt on my tongue. Softness and subtlety are recurring motifs, a striking departure from the current trend among modern Chinese restaurants toward forceful, fiery flavors. This can, at times, be a little bit boring: that omelette, for instance, a Taiwanese-informed riff on the tortilla española, was anodyne as baby food, and barely revived by a drizzle of scallion oil. But the kitchen’s quietude can also reveal moments of startling sophistication, as with a scallop crudo under a tangle of dried lily buds, the floral strands musky and tart against the fish’s supple sweetness. Cat’s ear noodles, toothsome little swoops of fresh dough, are tossed in a northern-Chinese-inspired ragout of braised lamb that’s scented oh-so-gently with cumin. A little pile of three bite-size pieces of zhū xiě gāo—a chewy Taiwanese black sausage made with pig’s blood and sticky rice—looks like nearly nothing, the exteriors coated to a bland beigeness in crushed peanuts, but it’s maybe the boldest dish on the menu, its mochi-like savoriness shot through with a sharp, controlled flare of heat. If you go to Lei looking for dinner, this parade of composure might not send you into raptures. But Lei isn’t really a restaurant; it is, quite pointedly, a wine bar, and it’s at its best when you approach it as one. It would be ideal to drop by for a nightcap after a meal somewhere nearby—a solo bowl of noodles at Maxi’s, or a riotous group dinner at Uncle Lou—to close the evening with a glass of bubbly and Lei’s zingy multi-citrus shaved-ice parfait, one of only two desserts on the menu. Shi’s bottle list encompasses an idiosyncratic mix of classics and oddballs, including stroppy Austrian natural whites alongside multi-thousand-dollar Burgundies, funky low-intervention oranges from Greece, a few bottles from the Japanese winery Coco Farm. The by-the-glass list skews a little less adventurous, with crowd-pleasing, apple-juicy pours—I was disappointed not to see any Chinese options, despite some on the bottle list—but the staff regularly opens interesting offerings from the bottle list that you might catch a pour of. One evening, I was lucky to try a glass of a thrilling Portuguese white that was muscular and gravelly, with surprising notes of coconut. It’s the sort of wine you don’t usually end up drinking, unless someone who really knows her stuff is running the show. Moreover, it’s the sort of wine that is set off, so prettily, so evocatively, by food that’s confident enough to speak quietly, and share the stage. ♦
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