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Mabel Lui

Walk into Potluck Club, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown in New York, and you will be greeted by a waiter at what looks like an old-fashioned phone booth with a pagoda-style roof.
As you head to your table, you will walk past a display featuring scenes from popular Hong Kong films like In the Mood for Love (2000) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004). You will also see a vending machine filled with the kinds of items that can be found in a Cantonese home – think haw flakes, Pei Pa Koa, Vitasoy drinks and even a pair of lucky cats.
The decor reflects the Cantonese influences that the Potluck Club founders grew up with in the United States. The booth, for example, is a nod to Chinatowns of the 1970s, when phone booths like this were in frequent operation.
“What you feel, hear and taste in our spaces is our upbringing,” says Cory Ng, one of the restaurant’s co-owners. “Whether it’s the music or the decor, and especially the food, it’s Cantonese-American.”

Potluck Club opened in 2022 during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the idea for the restaurant coming about when everyone was isolating at home.
At the time, chef Zhan Chen – who had spent more than a decade working in Mediterranean restaurants – began experimenting with his home cooking and re-exploring his Cantonese roots through food.
“I finally had time to slow down and think about what I wanted to do as a chef for my future and career,” he says.
When the opportunity arose to open a restaurant with Ng and their other childhood friends – in the space where Ng’s father used to sell lap cheong (Chinese sausage) – Chen felt it was time to focus on food inspired by their upbringing.
That meant cooking Cantonese food professionally, something he had never done. Naturally, he had doubts: “Is it that simple? Do I just cook my own food?” The answer was yes.

Potluck Club’s dishes are not the sort that you would expect to see at a dim sum restaurant or banquet hall. They are Cantonese with a twist, mirroring the fact that the team grew up in New York, which is home to a diverse range of cuisines.
The oyster mushroom rice roll noodles with hanger steak, for example, takes inspiration from Chinese beef chow fun and Italian gnocchi. Meanwhile, the salt and pepper chicken with spring onion biscuits, pickled jalapeños and chilli-plum jam reimagines a classic Southern American dish with a Cantonese flavour profile.
Also on the menu is jellyfish tiger salad with coriander, Chinese celery and spring onion – a dish that frequently confuses diners.
“I love that dish because it’s built upon [something that already] exists, and also educates people that you can eat jellyfish,” Chen says, recalling his experience of eating jellyfish at Chinese banquet halls as a child.

A big part of Potluck Club’s mission is to introduce people to new Cantonese food.
“As much as we’d love to see our restaurants filled with Asian diners, our goal is always to help bring Cantonese food to more people,” says Ricky Nguyen, another Potluck Club co-founder. “Depending on the region in China, there are subtle differences in the dishes … education is always the hardest part.”
The founding team also hope that the restaurant can help continue the legacy of Chinatown and ensure its survival, Ng says.
“Chinatown has shrunk to maybe half its size since we were growing up here. When we were kids, we never felt like minorities, because we were just like, ‘This is Chinatown.’ It was just us. When we went to school, 90 per cent of the kids were Cantonese, Taishanese, Fujianese.”

Ng himself was no exception – his father is from Hong Kong and his mother from Taishan. But now, he says, the neighbourhood is slowly giving way to real estate development and gentrification.
“You’re seeing condos being built, hotels being built,” he says. “You can’t stop that. That’s big money.”
It also does not help that most of the millennials who grew up in Chinatown have moved away, but Ng says the shift is expected, given the circumstances in which first-generation immigrant children grew up.
“You’re eating on top of your bathtub. You have one room with bunk beds, and you’re not bunking with your brothers; you’re with your parents. That’s how a lot of the kids grew up in the 1990s and 2000s,” he says.
“Now those kids [have grown] up, they have successful careers. They’re making their way up. They make six figures, and you think they are still going to live like that? They’re all going to move out. They’re going to move their parents out, too. So now, everyone has left.
“You walk around Chinatown right now, and it’s only the elderly. I’m not even talking about my parents’ age; I’m talking about my grandma’s age. That’s who’s still here, because they don’t want to leave.”

Recent years have seen the introduction of new stores in Chinatown, but most are chains from China, such as Molly Tea or Heytea, Ng says.
That is why he and his partners felt the need to reinvest in Chinatown and create a space that pays tribute to the Cantonese-style Chinatown they knew and loved while also integrating aspects of their New York identity.
“We were kids that grew up during the time of the 1990s and the 2000s, when we got the internet, we got pop culture, we got New York hip hop,” Ng says. “So this is a merge of everything at once. It’s deep Cantonese roots – everything our grandparents and our parents taught us – but mixed in with being New York kids. That’s what this means to us.”

In the years since opening Potluck Club, the founding team have doubled down on their commitment to Chinatown by opening a sister restaurant, Phoenix Palace. Located just a few blocks away from Potluck Club, the restaurant is inspired by Music Palace, a Chinese-language cinema in New York that closed in 2000.
“They played Young and Dangerous, [Stephen] Chow Sing-chi, Chow Yun-fat and all that stuff,” Ng recalls. Now, the same location is a hotel. “If we don’t build these cultural spaces that represent us, and the memory of Chinatown, it will go away.”
Like Potluck Club, Phoenix Palace is a celebration of what it means to be both Cantonese and American. The door opens to an American-style jukebox, which contains an effigy of Guan Gong, a deity and Chinese military general, and the walls are covered with black-and-white images of the founding team’s family members.
“This is a constant reminder that this is who we were. This is what got us here,” Ng says.

Of course, the team have put their own spin on what it means to be Cantonese-American. “We take all of that soul, and we just make it the 2025 version, because we’re going into the future. Time is not going to stop.”
At Phoenix Palace, the food is more celebratory than at Potluck Club, Chen says, but the East-meets-West bent is ever present. One of the dishes on the menu, for example, is the lobster sticky rice, which is made with sticky rice, “forbidden” or black rice, and crispy rice puffs. It also features pancetta, a bit of Italian influence that Chen brings from his past restaurant experience.
Other dishes on the menu include olive yaotiew – youtiao or fried dough sticks – as well as salt and pepper cuttlefish with heirloom tomato jam, and chilled tofu with spicy sesame foam.

Aside from breathing new life into Chinatown, the founders of Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace give back to the community that raised them. During the pandemic, the founders began offering meals to the elderly, a practice they still do every third Thursday of the month.
“That was a time of scarcity and fear. Now we don’t really treat it like that,” Ng says. “Now we’re treating it as: we want to celebrate you guys and say, ‘Hey, thank you for everything you’ve done for our entire generation.’
“That’s where our identity has changed a little bit … we’re not kids any more. We’re adults. It takes us doing the work, or else it doesn’t happen. You can’t just sit around and wait for someone to save you or do stuff for the community. If you want to get it done, or you want to see a difference, you have to pick it up and do it yourself.”
That is exactly what they have done with Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace.
“This celebrates us growing up in Chinatown, unapologetically,” Ng says. “This is who we are.”


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How Potluck Club reinvents Cantonese cuisine in Manhattan’s Chinatown in New York

Cory Ng is one of the co-founders of Potluck Club in Manhattan, New York. The restaurant serves Cantonese cuisine with a modern twist. Photo: Potluck Club

Potluck Club’s salt and pepper chicken with spring onion biscuits, pickled jalapeños and chilli-plum jam. Photo: Potluck Club

The decor at Potluck Club reflects the Cantonese influences with which the founders grew up. Photo: Potluck Club

A variety of dishes at Potluck Club. Photo: Potluck Club

The founders of New York’s Potluck Club pose with American television host Carson Daly (centre). Photo: Potluck Club

Jellyfish tiger salad with coriander, Chinese celery and spring onion at Potluck Club. Photo: Potluck Club

The entrance of Potluck Club is filled with nostalgic decor. Photo: Potluck Club

Phoenix Palace’s salt and pepper cuttlefish with heirloom tomato jam. Photo: Phoenix Palace

Phoenix Palace’s olive yaotiew, which is also known as youtiao. Photo: Phoenix Palace

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Mamoru Hayashi, managing director of the Heichinrou Group, which owns Metropol, chooses dim sum dishes at the Hong Kong restaurant in Admiralty on August 26, 2025. Photo: Elson Li

Hayashi chats over dim sum at Metropol on August 26, 2025. Photo: Elson Li

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Food name tags are seen on a dim sum cart at Metropol. Photo: SCMP

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Lifestyle

Food & Drink

From decor to dishes, the founders of Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace have looked to their childhood growing up in Manhattan’s Chinatown


From decor to dishes, the founders of Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace have looked to their childhood growing up in Manhattan’s Chinatown.


How Potluck Club reinvents Cantonese cuisine in Manhattan’s Chinatown in New York

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From decor to dishes, the founders of Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace have looked to their childhood growing up in Manhattan’s Chinatown

From decor to dishes, the founders of Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace have looked to their childhood growing up in Manhattan’s Chinatown