Lee opened Sunn’s in partnership with the wine maven Grant Reynolds, of Parcelle, who oversees the quite excellent wine program; as befits such a petite restaurant, the list is small but mighty, and by-the-glass options are limited to one red, one white, one orange (it’s Dimes Square, after all), and a “special pour” of whatever the staff is into at the moment. The wines pair uncannily well with Lee’s high-saturation flavors—even a spicy-tuna hand roll, which maybe leaned a little too heavily on the spicy, still did great against a bright, acidic Loire Valley red.
It’s been a good few months for pop-ups putting down brick-and-mortar roots on the Lower East Side, and adding some serious wine cred to the mix. Ha’s Snack Bar, which has been open since January, is from the husband-and-wife team behind Ha’s Đặc Biệt, a prolific Vietnamese pop-up that was almost as famous for the speed at which tickets to its events sold out as it was for its thrilling, sophisticated, often unexpected food. Pete Wells, the former Times restaurant critic, declared its 2021 residency (a pop-up double bill with Kreung Cambodia) at Outerspace, in Bushwick, “the restaurant of the summer”—coincidentally, the day after being so dubbed, Ha’s owner-chefs Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha quit the residency, the culmination of a long period of difficulty in their relationship with their host.
Ha’s was back almost immediately, partnering with restaurants again—and what a set of restaurants! The Four Horsemen! Yellow Rose! Bistro Paul Bert, in Paris! Still, I imagine that, for Burns and Ha, to now be able to work within the stabilizing framework of a lease, and plumbing, and their own choice of color on the walls—mostly white, it turns out, in a romantic, dimly lit sort of way, though the open kitchen in the back of the cozy space anchors the whole room on big square tiles of primary, elementary-school blue—it must be a relief. (But maybe not an unalloyed one: a Ha’s reservation has been one of the hottest tickets in town lately, the buzz so strong it’s verging on a roar; when Burns and Ha learned I’d be writing about the restaurant, they politely requested that I not, saying that they “are not looking for any additional press coverage at this time.”) The chalkboard menu lists a daily-written lineup of dishes, their flavors legibly Vietnamese but with an appealing dose of cool-kid weirdness, and a decidedly more-French-than-you-might-expect French inflection. A grated-carrot salad, for example, that stodgiest of Parisian luncheon dishes, is here jolted into sizzling vividity with cara-cara orange segments and rau ram (Vietnamese coriander), an herb whose flavor is so forcefully green that it almost verges on heat. Escargot, little swirls of chewy slime, swam in an ocean of sizzling, tamarind-spiked butter fiery with fresh garlic. A scallop crudo was dressed in limequat juice and capers and so many tingly peppercorns that it set my lips aflame. Hunks of braised leek stood upright on a bed of the softest, eggiest sauce gribiche, doused in sweet-hot chile sauce. The vibe, if it must be distilled, is flawless; it’s impossible to be unhappy eating cilantro-garnished pâté on a wedge of baguette while Joan Armatrading breaks everyone’s heart over the sound system. On each of my visits, after welcoming me in, a server delivered a line with the inflection of a caution to cautious diners, a warning and a promise: “Everything contains fish sauce.” Go ahead, threaten me with a good time. ♦
