Bistrot Ha Is the Right Kind of Restaurant Evolution

"A little more than a year ago, after running a successful pop-up called Ha's Đặc Biệt, the chefs Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha opened Ha's Snack Bar, an itsy-bitsy restaurant on the Lower East Side. The Snack Bar, like the pop-up, served Vietnamese-inspired dishes that were clever, cheffy (and more than a bit French-inflected), and utterly cool without any sort of hauteur."

"From just about the instant it opened, the place became a monstrous hit-dramatically, fervidly, almost disorientingly. Enormous crowds gathered outside the Broome Street storefront in the hope of being chosen to occupy a spare stool. Social media was relentless, traditional media breathless. Still, from the beginning, they were clear that the Snack Bar was just a first step on their brick-and-mortar journey-not their "real" restaurant, as such, but a staging ground from which to figure out a grander opening to come."

"the food is an elegant wallop of neon flavors, foregrounding the punctilious greenness of Vietnamese herbs and the languorous funk of organ meats and offcuts, but now there's room to breathe, to relax a little, to take it all in, to linger. There's a neat stainless-steel bar running along one wall at which you could, in theory, nurse a glass of some minerally Old World red, or a ballet-pink lychee cosmo, though for the moment its seats are all given over to dine"

Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha moved from a successful pop-up and the tiny Ha's Snack Bar into a larger neighborhood restaurant, Bistrot Ha, twelve months after the Snack Bar opened. The Snack Bar offered Vietnamese-inspired, cheffy dishes with French inflections and quickly attracted large crowds and intense media attention. Bistrot Ha seats roughly a dozen marble-topped tables and allows guests to linger more comfortably. The menu continues to emphasize bright Vietnamese herbs, bold neon flavors, and adventurous use of organ meats and offcuts. A stainless-steel bar suggests both mineral Old World wines and playful cocktails like a ballet-pink lychee cosmo.

Read at The New Yorker