MoMo & Coco

NYC’s Best Modern Chinese Restaurant Desserts

Introduction

There is no question that Americans have long been obsessed with all things Japanese, and that that obsession has extended into the restaurant scene. In NYC, Japanese omakase, ramen and desserts are as ubiquitous as Starbucks…perhaps even more so. But, in the last 2-3 years, with the Hallyu wave sweeping the world, NYC has also developed a new infatuation with all things Korean. In the restaurant arena, we previously documented the proliferation of both casual and Michelin-star Korean restaurants (and their many dessert offerings, see here and here) in NYC. But putting aside NYC’s enduring love affair with Japanese restaurants and its new honeymoon with Korean restaurants, we also note a nascent trend in modern Chinese dessert making. In this volume of “NYC’s Best Restaurant Desserts,” we showcase four spots where you can find modern restaurant desserts infused with traditional Chinese flavours.

*  NYC’s best traditional Chinese restaurant desserts will be featured in a separate guide coming soon!

Hutong

  • ☑ Dessert destination: Hutong, Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan.
  • ☑ Budget: $$$$.
  • ☑ Best for: Elevated westernized Chinese food with elevated prices – for a Western crowd, and for corporate card or special date night dining.
  • ☑ Short and sweet story: Hutong is the oldest modern Chinese restaurant on this list. What a deceiving name it has. A “hutong” is a back alley behind traditional Chinese dwellings. By contrast, the vibe of Hutong in NYC (and its older sister branches in HK and London) is nothing like its namesake alleyways. Hutong NYC is instead, a place you go to to impress someone…excluding your Chinese parents. It’s a very sophisticated modern Chinese restaurant; its exuberantly mirrored and chanderliered interiors draw the work crowds during the week and the date night crowds during the weekend. As to be expected of a restaurant of Hutong’s character, the food is beautifully presented, but muted in flavour profile. It is rather, Hutong’s dessert menu that draws us back – in particular, the Bao dessert, a trompe l’oeil creation hiding salted caramel, sesame cake and praline in a white sesame shell, and accompanied by a ball of soy milk ice cream. A textbook study of “not too sweet.”

Juqi

  • ☑ Dessert destination: Juqi, Flushing, Queens.
  • ☑ Budget: $$$-$$$$.
  • ☑ Best for: Elevated traditional Northern Chinese food.
  • ☑ Short and sweet story:  If Manhattan Chinatown is trapped in a time warp of China in the 1970s/1980s, Flushing Chinatown is China in the late 2010s. Imported direct from the mainland, Juqi is one of the best higher-end Chinese restaurants in NYC. Whereas Hutong is modern Chinese for a largely Western crown, Juqi is modern Chinese for an Asian crowd. Its specialty is the Peking duck, but the rest of the menu skims across Northern Chinese cuisine (including an excellent sizzling cumin lamb dish and all the dumplings) before touching lightly into Sichuan territory with a wide vat of numbing sauerkraut fish. The dishes at Juqi are all excellent and immensely generous in portion size. If you can fit it in, don’t miss dessert. Of the extensive dessert menu, especially don’t miss the Mahhjong dessert, where rectangles of dense yellow pea cake are lined up ready for a game of how many can you eat.

Yingtao

  • ☑ Dessert destination: Yingtao, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan.
  • ☑ Budget: $$$$ ($1855pp + tip/tax).
  • ☑ Best for: A barely-there modern Chinese-inflected tasting menu experience.
  • ☑ Short and sweet story:  By contrast to Hutong and Juqi, Yingtao is a tasting menu restaurant. Whereas the aesthetic of most of NYC’s modern Korean Michelin restaurants errs on the minimalist side, Yingtao exudes a distinctively moodier vibe of luxurious dining.  Its ten-course tasting menu is also heartier in substance compared to equivalent Korean counterparts, but had we not known beforehand that its specialty was supposed to be modern Chinese fine dining, we might have thought it was simply French, with a sprinkling of Chinese flavours. For example, never have we seen a Chinese restaurant serve up raw fish, or duck cooked like it’s wagyu…In any event, the highlight was the dessert epilogue, largely because this was where the potential of “modern Chinese” was more evident. Here, a crystalline shovel of sour-plum-flavoured ice deftly cleansed the palate to leave room for an exquisite creamy spoonful of Yingtao’s Niang Gao dessert. One of the bestttttt restaurant desserts that we have had in a long time…probably since the now sadly shuttered Joomak actually…

Four Twenty Five

  • ☑ Dessert destination: Four Twenty Five, Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan.
  • ☑ Budget: $$$$.
  • ☑ Best for: Modern American, with an inflection of Asia – for corporate card dining.
  • ☑ Short and sweet story:  It’s been a long time since we have entered a NYC restaurant and have felt like we entered into a completely rarefied world of old school glamour and money. Such is 425 Park Avenue, a supremely elegant restaurant similar to Le Jardinier or Le Pavillon. It’s fifty shades of French champagne beige, from head to toe in furnishings and the predominant patron crowd too. You might be wondering why then, we are featuring 425 in this dessert of NYC’s best modern Chinese desserts. It is because its dessert menu has a dessert called Tang Yuan, where tang yuan balls filled with black sesame float in a wide white plate bejewelled with sliced red and green grapes and gold-leaf rice crackers. It’s the most luxe version of tang yuan that we have ever seen, and a perfect blend of modern Chinese and modern French-American in one spoonful. And kudoes to the pastry chef for expressly acknowledging the traditional roots of the dessert too.

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