Eater Young Gun Lucas Sin (’19) wants to tell the story of Chinese food
Among this class of “new school” Chinese chefs and restaurateurs, attention has only just started to shift to thoughts of scale and fast-casual chains, Málà Project’s Kang says.
In Sin’s eyes, fast casual is one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of Chinese food in the U.S. He believes consumers may eventually be so enthusiastic about the cuisine that there could be “an Eataly [and] a Per Se of Chinese food.” He likens it to building a house on the foundation of the Chinatown mom-and-pop shops that have a long history creating and adapting dishes like General Tso’s chicken for the American palate.
To accomplish the team’s lofty ambitions for growth and scale , Junzi needs to be affordable, accessible, and above all, conscious of the people eatingmaking the food, says Sin. Junzi doesn’t hire exclusively Chinese cooks well trained on the wok; rather, the employees are “the people who live and work here,” says Sin, gesturing to his young staff, among them black and Latinx and white employees.
Trying to appeal to a wider audience also means having to broaden the definition of Chinese food, just as the Chinese-American restaurants that came before Sin did in previous decades. He used to be a stickler about not serving raw vegetables, because that’s not traditionally done in Chinese cuisine, but customers have been asking for a salad or bowl option, especially in the Bryant Park location to which office workers flock.
Junzi’s ideal future, according to Sin, will include better food, even happier employees, and more modes of business, like full-service restaurants, fine dining, ghost kitchens, catering, events, consumer packaged goods — all in service of the chain’s mission of telling the story of Chinese food.
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