New Shanghai

At CheLi in the East Village, soup dumplings only scratch the surface of a menu that is traditional and innovative at once.

- ADAM PLATT

PLENTY OF RESTAURANTS closed during the great plague year, of course, but plenty opened, too. While most of us were slumbering on our couches in a Zoom-addled stupor, the irrepressible spirit of the dining world bubbled endlessly on just below the dark surface of things. Menus were composed; spaces leased; plans that had been hatched months, years, and even decades earlier inched forward. As dining sheds sprouted up on the sidewalks last summer, brick-and-mortar operations slowly began to open too. They opened in empty hotel lobbies (Vestry) and empty office towers (Le Pavillon). They opened in Brooklyn (Xilonen, Francie) and in different corners of the Bronx (Hudson Smokehouse), and now, as we emerge from our collective slumber, there are suddenly all sorts of new and unfamiliar places to try—many of which appear to have dropped, fully formed, out of the sky.

At least that’s how it appeared to me a few weeks back, when I wiped the sleep from my eyes and wandered over on a steamy summer evening to try to secure a table at the newish Shanghainese restaurant CheLi, which opened last fall among the jumble of cafés and ramen shacks on St. Marks Place in the East Village. They wouldn’t be able to seat us for a while, I was politely told, and scanning the buzzing room, you could see why. Whole families—including doting grandparents and babies in strollers— crowded around the tables. The owner, a restaurant group called DaShan, has built the space to resemble a quaint Chinese village, complete with carved wooden rooftops and paper lanterns hanging from bamboo rafters. And with the exception of the bustling, competent wait staff, most of the people in the room were conversing in Mandarin and even Shanghainese.