Tucked into the far reaches of the West Village, RedFarm sits between old Tudor and brownstone buildings along Hudson Street, looking down from the dining room window onto passersby. This modern Chinese restaurant has been run by some of the masters of the restaurant industry and Chinese cooking for several years, but has come to life lately with a series of dishes that burst in flavor and creativity. The dining room is a small space that feels perfectly intimate, with two long tables and a few booths lining the walls.
While most Chinese restaurants in the city have a typical lineup of dishes ready to offer, RedFarm takes commonplace menu items and extends them that much farther. Eggrolls at RedFarm are not merely just fried and carted out to tables. They’re stuffed with pastrami from Katz’s Deli, and fried using two different kinds of dough to create a mixture of textures in the mouth. The restaurant also specializes in using black truffles when possible with the correct season, incorporating the ingredient in a variety of ways that offer a burst of flavor from the first bite and follow it up with the textures of each dish. According to co-owner Ed Schoenfeld, a Brooklyn-born man who’s garnered an impressive career launching restaurants for decades in the city, the added technique of the chefs is what makes the restaurant really incredible. For instance, most Chinese restaurants make dumpling dough using either hot or cold water, which can cause the dough to absorb the soup in soup dumplings. At RedFarm, chefs blend two different doughs to have the same great texture, without having to sacrifice a big slurp of soup inside.
RedFarm also excels in creativity on the plate rather than just in the mouth. Dishes can almost look like surrealist or pop art, and are ripe for any Instagram feed. For instance, the “Pac Man” Dumplings, are an array of four dumplings in the colors of the signature ghosts, with a Pac Man-shaped circle of deep fried sweet potato chasing them down the plate. While the dish itself is a great blend of flavor, the appearance almost comes with a wait time for everyone to doll out their phones and snap pictures before eating.
Don’t sleep on the cocktails either here. Le Club Hot is an incredible tequila cocktail that strangely matches Chinese cuisine seamlessly. With a smoked salt ring and cucumber garnish, the drink is the perfect amount of citrus and acidity to keep one’s stomach from filling too quickly before the next dish arrives. For those looking for cocktails a little lighter on alcohol content, the House Mule is also a great option that is a sweet, ginger-heavy drink.
With a plethora of Chinese restaurants available in the city from take-out spots to off the wall creations by chefs, and everything in between, RedFarm stands apart. Through a mix of creativity, front-of-house service, and deep historical knowledge of the cuisine and the craftsmanship that goes into each bite, RedFarm separates itself through interesting, artful takes on classic dishes.
RedFarm is located at 529 Hudson Street.
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