Chinese Tuxedo & Opera House

Address: 5 Doyers St, New York, NY, 10013, United States
Tel: +1 877-357-1964
Website: view Chinese Tuxedo & Opera House’s website
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chinesetuxedo/

The restaurant takes its name from an earlier Chinese Tuxedo, regarded as Chinatown's first fine-dining Chinese restaurant. Today's incarnation approaches Chinese banquet cooking from a contemporary perspective under executive chef Paul Donnelly, with a menu designed for sharing. Cocktails receive similarly thoughtful treatment and frequently incorporate flavours associated with Chinese and wider Asian cooking.

Beneath Chinese Tuxedo on Chinatown's crooked Doyers Street, Opera House is a subterranean cocktail bar that draws directly on the remarkable history of its address. From 1893 until 1911, the building was home to New York's first Chinese theatre, and the modern-day bar uses that theatrical past as the starting point for both its surroundings and its drinks.

The intimate room is suitably dramatic. Exposed structural details are paired with gold accents, booths, and moon-shaped doorways, while behind the bar hangs a large painting in a classical Chinese style, created by the owner's father-in-law. The bar itself effectively becomes the stage, giving the relatively dark space the atmosphere of a small theatre awaiting a performance.

That theme continues through a particularly ambitious cocktail programme. Twelve signatures are each named after a Chinese opera and draw inspiration from Chinese folklore and literature, with beverage director Beau Bradley using ingredients more commonly found in the kitchen than at the cocktail station. Baijiu, Shaoxing wine, Sichuan peppercorn, pu-erh tea, red bean, miso, sesame and salted egg all make appearances.