Cha Kee Is a Beacon in Chinatown’s Revival

A new restaurant with a wide-ranging view of Chinese food is a bright spot in a beleaguered neighborhood.

All good New Yorkers know that Lower Manhattan would lose a piece of its identity if Chinese businesses disappeared from Chinatown. In Little Italy, when the Italian Americans moved away, real estate brokers scrubbed one part of the area of its ethnic identity by renaming it NoLIta. If this tactic is successful a few blocks south, we could see apartment listings on Doyers and Pell Streets advertising their prime location in the heart of SoChiTo.

Walk around the neighborhood on any given day, and this scenario won’t seem as far-fetched as it should be. Chinatown started to empty out almost two years ago, when Covid-19 was still a rumor in New York City but a poisonous anti-Asian mood was rising, and it is still not packed the way it used to be. The tourists the area depends on still haven’t returned in force. And for the past few years, the focus of the city’s permanent class of Chinese-restaurant geeks has shifted to other parts of town, especially the East Village and Flushing, Queens.

But there is a new restaurant that deserves their attention down on Mott Street, under the hundreds of orange, yellow and pink paper lanterns that a group of Chinatown boosters has strung over the pavement. Cha Kee arrived in September with a menu that is fundamentally Chinese but bends this way and that to borrow ideas from other places, particularly Japan. Revolution is not Cha Kee’s aim, but it does hold more surprises than many of the neighborhood’s old familiar haunts.