RedFarm

RedFarm is a collaboration between one of New York’s greatest Chinese chefs, Joe Ng, and one of its greatest Chinese restaurateurs, Ed Schoenfeld. (Only one of them, Mr. Ng, is Chinese by birth.) They have several clever ideas here. First, they tailored their menu of modern Chinese cuisine for a Western palate, with none of the bland and slippery specialties that non-Chinese eaters find so enigmatic. Second, they call the cooking “Chinese cuisine with a Greenmarket sensibility,” which boils down to spending more on ingredients than many Chinese restaurants. Finally, all the flavors in many of the dishes have been turned up as high as they will go. The dishes can be salty, or sweet, or rich. Often they are all three at once.