![]() ![]() “Chinatown’s food scene has changed a great deal over the past 40 years. “Today is my 11th time here,” Alice Chiao, who lives in midtown and stumbled across the restaurant shortly after it opened, told me earlier this week. Oxtail casserole arrives with a sticky gravy, and other dishes - like steamed or fried pork patties with salted fish - are marked with a lo wah kiu stamp of approval. The low wah kiu dishes are highlighted within a section on the 200-item menu, where you’ll find delicacies like pork belly braised with pickled mustard greens buffalo fish steamed with ginger-scallion sauce and chenpi duck, cooked in a jiggly sauce of sweet-bitter, sun-dried Mandarin peel that is reminiscent of marmalade. “The low wah kiu.” As Chan puts it, “I call this the more OG Cantonese.” “It’s Cantonese, the old Chinese style from the countryside,” Wong explains. Wong also loves to talk about food, Cantonese food specifically, of the sort that some Chinatown locals lament is missing from the city these days. When he and I started to discuss the Knicks, he told me about the time he almost became an usher at Madison Square Garden. I love my job.”Īt the restaurant, Wong is eager to chat with customers and quick to pounce on what he perceives as shared interests. ‘Why? You don’t need to work.’ But I’ve been working the last 45 years. “When I walk down the street, I see people and tell them I’ve opened up a restaurant business. Instantly Wong got what he wanted and found himself working nonstop: “My feet don’t belong to me anymore,” he says. He even had the perfect name: Uncle Lou.Īfter finding a 2,000-square-foot location on Mulberry Street, Wong and his partners (including his nephew, Eddie Chan) opened the restaurant in late December. He had the necessary neighborhood connections, a love of food, friends who were experienced cooks, and other friends who would be eager to try the old-school Cantonese food that he wanted to serve. He had never run one before, but he missed people. It was during this time that a couple of Wong’s friends started to talk about opening a restaurant. “Like my ex-wife says, every day I wake up, I’m the first one to leave the door. “I was so frustrated sitting at home,” he explains. He wasn’t sleeping, he was tired, and he needed to do something. When the pandemic hit, Wong finally retired, ready to enjoy his 60s. In the ’90s, he opened his own store, Speedy Communications, first selling pagers and then cell phones, while expanding with several other locations. He has lived in the area for nearly 50 years, and, in that time, worked variously in restaurants, trucking, the garment industry, and newspapers and as a bookie. To his neighbors in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Louis Wong is Uncle Lou. ![]() Louis Wong, center, with Eddie Chan and Gloria Wong inside their new restaurant, Uncle Lou. ![]()
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