

Foodie Experiences
Chinatown's buzziest small-plates room, where shao bing and cocktails you can't pronounce will do the talking for you.
Bao Bei is where you take someone when you want to seem like a person who knows things. The things you know, in this case, are shao bing, mantou with pork belly, sticky rice cake, and a cocktail nobody at the table can pronounce without checking the menu twice. The room is dim, the music is right, and the plates are "Chinese-ish" in the best possible way, which is to say they land somewhere between Shanghai, Taiwan and pure invention and refuse to apologize for it. No white tablecloths, no stiffness, no awkward formal silences. You're just reaching across a small table to steal each other's food, which is honestly the whole point. Go early or make peace with flirting in the queue.