Good afternoon, everyone.
If you need somewhere to grab dinner before the Phoebe Bridgers concert tonight at Barclays, I recommend Wasan or Bedouin Tent (which is BYOB but they also don’t always have a bottle opener around).
Today’s newsletter includes: A list of storm-related cancellations in New York, a new multi-brand luxury store in Brooklyn, an NSFW ad that ran in a Hamptons newspaper, J Lee falls in love with crab fat noodles, WYouth’s latest hire, a scoop on New York Magazine’s first men’s issue cover (that drops next week), Happier Grocery expands uptown (and possibly to Aspen), caviar and edible gold leaf are dead, sweatpants are an indicator that you have an important job in the Meta office, and Serena Kerrigan opens up about what it’s been like to sell a book.
I don’t know much about love, but I’m certainly in the mood for something. By J Lee.
Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he wrote about Lucas Sin and Camden Hauge’s pop-up, Lok Kee.
It’s list season. These days it feels like it’s always list season, but the lists have been coming and they’ll keep coming. Not to be a downer, but the year will be over before we even know it. Time flies when you’re having fun. I’ve been looking back, thinking about my year, about the meals I’ve loved. I try not to think about the meals I’ve not loved. It might be recency bias, it might just be regular old bias (I am friends with the chef, and also I’m Cantonese), but I think I may have eaten my best meal of the year, just a few weeks ago, at a restaurant that’s not yet open, but will be soon.
Lok Kee is a popup, it’s a preview of what’s to come, it’s a mission statement. It’s a flag planted at M Star Cafe. M Star Cafe is a cha chaan teng, an all-day Hong Kong Cafe that looks straight out of 2002, with its lime green chairs and mural of Yao Ming and Faye Wong. It sits on Division Street, the heart of Chinatown, on the cusp of what they now call “Two Bridges,” a stone’s throw from Bar Oliver. During the day, M Star serves egg sandwiches, milk tea, macaroni soups, and french toast (a laminated sign threatens you with a tuna fish-stuffed deep-fried french toast). But at night, for a few weeks this summer, chef Lucas Sin and his wife Camden Hauge took the place over, and M Star became Lok Kee. They turned off the fluorescent lights, and hung a red neon sign, giving the place the photogenic glow of Hong Kong noir. I don’t know much about love, but I’m certainly in the mood for something. No restaurant in New York has better lighting than M Star Cafe when it’s Lok Kee.