Imagination Worth the Added Price at Midtown’s La Chine

I’m not saying that I would turn down an opportunity to eat in this place, or any of the others that Mr. Wells has recently reviewed. But they are still not restaurants I really want to eat in.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a really good strong cup of black coffee, or freshly brewed dark tea, in any restaurant.

Or a large, simple Caesar salad composed of greens tasting as if they had been gathered in the garden that morning with just a touch of freshly made-up garlic and vinegar dressing.

Or a dish of spaghetti caruso tasting of earthy vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh chicken livers, and mushrooms actually grown somewhere just for the purpose of their taste.

Or any serving of French food anywhere that did not look as if it had been incessantly worried over and moved-around on the plate with no apparent thought to anything other than its appearance.

Can we not just drop the theatrics and the unintelligible menus and get back to basics? Give us a quiet room, comfortable chairs and tables, starched cloth napkins, heavy flatware, waiters and waitresses who don’t say much but know everything, and plain, simple, honest food served on old-fashioned china. (With just chocolate cake and homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert.)

And then, if they absolutely must, let them go ahead and raise the prices

I'm glad there's yummy, inventive Chinese food in Manhattan. On the other hand, I am just assuming that this is the final justification of this article; I stopped reading after the third paragraph, since it seemed painfully obvious the author was setting up a justification for why he thought it was appropriate to spend more than $50 a head on great Chinese in NY. He is wrong; great Chinese can be had for almost nothing (ten or less person). This great, inventive, haute-cuisine level that he's fixated on here, no, I'm sure the author is right; you need to pay a lot for it. Yet it seems a disservice to the hundreds of little mom and pop places in Brooklyn and Flushing serving awesome, but more homestyle dishes.
This sounds like a great restaurant that _happens_ to be Chinese. Can't wait for the Times to pitch their story that way some day. Until then, I'll be disappointed by the "it's ethnic, but don't worry---totally worth it!!! line."

Sitting here in Vermont where the closes Chinese restaurant is an all-you-can-eat buffet I so envy my Manhattan friends and their ability to eat the kind of food we can only dream about. Mouth watering.

Odd that they put the BBQ pork above the flat deep-frying skimmer. Do they want the sizzling fat to drip down and thus make the dish less greasy looking when it lands on the dining table?

You can easily name a few Chinese dishes, but to define Chinese food in thorough and pithy fashion, to me, is even harder than something like training myself for the NY marathon. You can overgeneralize things by saying there're 8 major types of cuisine in China. But it does not include the many variations and those fond in major ethnic groups like the Muslims or Mongolians. Neither does it include the prominent cuisines of HK, Macao and Taiwan.

Perhaps an easier route to figure things out is to ask the Chinese what the best and most delicious is. No one has answered it more vividly than Empress Dowager Cixi. "Mountain Treasures and Sea Tastiness", said by the ultimate foodie guru. So it's all about ingredients - the freshest, the wild and the untreated.

If you tasted tips of spring bamboo shoots or song rong(a wild mushroom found exclusively on high elevations in Tibetan mountain) or steamed live white eel or grand-cru grade giant yellow croaker or corvenia from China or the humbling porridge made from first crop of mountain millet, you'd easily be put into a trance. This is a quote from Mr. Pete Wells. But for me, they're the food that will make you lose control. The utterly enigmatic Chinese food in its labyrinth!

Let's be honest for a moment here, there is nothing classy about mutilated carcasses on plates as concerns the truly thoughtful members of modern society. Doubtless this factoid will trouble the morally and intellectually challenged (and insecure), but someone ought to ring the reality bell when it comes to rank and overpriced glorification of tortured carcinogenic dead things and the stuffing of such a disgraceful mess into uneducated face-holes.

Here in Vancouver - Chinese wealth and demand for exemplary Chinese food - have significantly pushed up prices. The idea of paying a lot for wekk nade Chinese food has always been accepted here.

The review makes the food sound delightful - and touches on something that is lacking even in the best of Chinese restaurants. And that is genuine innovation. Most Chinese chefs are the product of an closed and private apprentice system - the result of which means that classic standards are always prepared extremely well. In Vancouver - the Hong Kong Cantonese culinary ideals of restraint and purity are in full force.

But when elements of Western cooking (or even influences from other parts of China) are incorporated - the dish often feels like a bad compromise. I was served a dish of roll of deep fried tofu, stuffed with mushrooms, and served with a broken tomato/olive oil/ balsamic vinegar sauce. Terrible. Or the overuse of truffle oil in dim sum. Blech.

But if there is genuine finesse and innovation (as with the Chairman in HK) then it would be worth to sample the food at La Chine.

Naturally Mr. Wells would hope for more adventurous Chinese restaurants. What could be better, given his bias, favoring Asian influence in western cuisine.

I have always considered Chinese cuisine to be one of the three greatest cuisines in the world (the others being French and Indian). There is a wealth of complex techniques, incredible variety of local and imported ingredients, and millennia of history that exists nowhere else in Asia. If you have only seen it as "cheapo 3 dishes for $20" you have missed so much; it is like judging French haute cuisine from a frozen quiche. I have never cared for the raging enthusiasm so many American top-name chefs have for Japanese food; it is nothing compared to the greatest Chinese cuisine (and I'm Japanese, btw).

Nice to hear Mr. Wells praise a great new upscale Chinese restaurant - since what you see in NYC eventually shows up in the San Francisco Bay Area, maybe I can finally hope to see a revival of the great, creative Chinese cooking we had in the '80's, that eventually died under the weight of budget-minded "well all ethnic cooking should be cheaper, why should I pay more?"

You pay more because IT IS GREAT COOKING, not just greasy slop with filler.

I was in the Waldorf Astoria when I was first married 30 years ago overwhelmed and thrilled. 'Gourmands on the Run!' (ebook). I still love the hotel 30's architecture.

There have always been some high end Chinese restaurants in town, like Shun Lee, Auntie Yuan and etc. Back in he late 80's I was the only non-chinese waiter at Chin Chin, which was a good restaurant at the time, and a beautiful room. I heard it recently closed. There was also a place near the UN that had revolving chefs from different provinces of China, but I've forgotten the name of the place. La Chine sounds good, but "very expensive." $90 for a duck? I kind of like the joints of Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park.

I would absolutely love to see more high end Chinese restaurants here in NYC. I am an ABC, and love any and all Chinese food. But, it kills me that I live in the greatest city in the world, and yet can't even get dim sum of anywhere near the quality and creativity that I've found in Toronto (let alone Vancouver, California, Hong Kong...) La Chine sounds like a great start, and has been put on my list of places to try.

Disconcerting how such a good review for a deserving restaurant is rewarded with the same two stars that Per Se received despite its crushing review. Comparing the reviews you would think La Chine deserved four stars while Per Se deserved zero.

The idea of an "expensive" Chinese restaurant as an unusual proposition resides only outside of Asia. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and now mainland China, expensive "Chinese" restaurants abound. It's good that the rest of the world is now catching up.

For Chinese food to be expensive seems contrary to the Laws of Nature!

As someone who just devastatingly paid $92 for a just-OK duck at Jeffrey Chodorow's whizbang-PR'd new restaurant in Miami, and have sadly yet to experience the "nuanced and technically excellent" cuisine commenter Pookipichu describes at Hakkasan NYC, because its Miami outpost is seriously less than thrilling, this review only again reiterates why I should allocate more dollars to flying to NY to eat at Pete Wells' suggestions / destinations rather than to continually waste thousands on subpar meals on this tourist trappy sandbar. Judge what you want about expensive food, but I just want to gobble that honey glazed pork, the yellowtail in peppercorn oil, and just about every other dish photographed on their website, starting with that shiny duck that's $22 less than I just paid for. In NYC. At the Waldorf Astoria. Please.

You have whetted my appetite for so many dishes, cauliflower, duck, crab, chicken consomme, and that old war horse, chicken with cashews. Chinese food should not be relegated to the bargain bin, but because for so many years, it has been the cheap way to eat in NY, it's stuck with that reputation. I'm all for fair prices for fine dining. Thanks for sharing the good news.

Although I kinda get that you got over your own need to discuss "expensive" in terms of a Chinese restaurant, it still smacks of this need to in the first place. Sure, many other folk will impose their notion that Chinese food should be inexpensive, but why reinforce that notion here? Every review of an Italian or French does not make this a premise to engage on, so why here? You can easily drop $20 on a plate of pasta, the noodles having likely origins in the far east, and that's for a plate with far less ingredient cost than a lamb dish (here: i just went to Babbo's menu: "Agnolotti with Brown Butter and Sage $20" - ingredient cost: likely less than $2). This restaurant is in the Waldorf, in midtown and $38 for lamb is remarkable in no way whatsoever compared to the marketplace for fine dining in Manhattan.