Below 14th is back!
Returned from long travels and teaching, we review three excellent restaurants in lower Manhattan ...
Last summer, my old friend Frank Moga came to the city with his son, who was touring Fordham University, and asked to have dinner. Frank was one of the surgeons and primary characters in my book about pediatric heart surgery, Walk On Water. They were staying in the no-man’s land of NYC’s generic midtown hotels so I said, “Frank, you gotta show Ben the West Village.”
They were game and I suggested Red Farm, which had recently reopened after a 2022 fire.
The food here is like Chinese food as imagined by a Jewish New Yorker—because that’s what it is. Created by Ed Schoenfeld in 2011, who died from cancer the year of the fire, the restaurant serves a kind of a “best of” of from the Chinese-American repertoire—crispy beef, for instance—along with some weird creations such as the pastrami egg roll (actually quite good).
Only toward the end of the meal did I learn that the city had yet to turn the gas back on. I clarified with the server: “Wait, you are operating this entire restaurant without gas?” The restaurant was full.
They brought me back to the kitchen. Sure enough, the stations were lined with individual induction burners on which pots and steamers cooked dumplings and a flames rose from wood in the grill. A remarkable feat of jerry-rigging a professional kitchen.
Several months after Frank’s visit, the restaurant wrote to me that they finally had gas, and they were also at last able to open Decoy, their Peking Duck restaurant directly below Red Farm.
We felt happy to return to both.
