Preparing for a Nashville trip a few years ago, I learned that Austin Tex-Mex mainstay Chuy’s had franchised. Growing up, I’d eaten at the original once, maybe twice, since getting a seat took a second but the food didn’t seem to be better than essentially identical/plentiful alternatives. After I left town they scaled up, opening their first out-of-state location in 2009 and issuing an IPO in 2012. The restaurant had come a long way since George W.’s then-underage daughters got busted there for attempting to buy margaritas with someone else’s ID.
Every franchise has to start somewhere; Tex-Mex is a pan-American staple and the food was fine, so fair enough, but it’s still somehow unexpected every time this happens. I’ve been in NYC for 20 years, enough time to witness, e.g., the expansion of Dos Toros from its first location and attendant excitement about “authentic Mission-style burritos” coming to the city to the chain’s now unquestioned and fairly un-beloved citywide ubiquity as “Chipotle, but a little better.” Xi’an Famous Foods’s second location opened so fast that I didn’t even have to go to the Flushing original before they were also open in Manhattan; after that, they launched so many locations so fast that they had to close some during the pandemic and are now gearing up for a second expansion. Pecking House opened as a delivery-only Flushing-based business with a small sitdown component during the pandemic and commanded absurd lines as a pop-up for its novel Sichuan pepper fried chicken; now it has a location in downtown Brooklyn where you can walk in and get seated pretty much anytime, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re similarly ubiquitous in a decade’s time.
Looking for a quick place to eat in the Financial District last fall, I found a location of Gai Chicken & Rice. I remembered their first location opening and Robert Sietsema flagging their take on Hainanese chicken and rice as a highlight of Essex Market upon its 2019 opening. A decade ago, you couldn’t find Hainanese chicken and rice in Manhattan, but in the late aughts a number of places started offering it as their specialty focus. As an option that’s reasonably healthy and affordable, it’s nice to have more of it outside the outer boroughs, and that includes this closely related Thai Khao Min Gai variant. And Gai Chicken & Rice is currently franchising; as their site says, “Until now, there hasn’t been a scalable QSR concept that offers simplified Thai cuisine without sacrificing flavor.”
Their FiDi location is fine in its way; the chicken unexciting but juicy, accompanied by ginger rice that’s nothing to write home about and an accompanying spicy green sauce successfully doing a lot of the work. It’s a decent option to have in a formerly hopeless area for anything fast, casual and edible, but also depressing the same way so many new restaurants in the city are. You can’t order from a person, but instead have to use a kiosk (which I guess is more user-friendly than a Starbucks I saw recently where you couldn’t order anything without using the chain’s app, raising compulsory data harvesting to a whole new level). If you choose to eat within Gai Chicken & Rice itself, you will be reminded that this isn’t a preferred option; there’s maybe six stools bolted in front of a Chipotle-esque metal strip. This is 100% a space optimized for workers picking up a desk lunch, and while that’s nice for the restaurant’s employees on some level—they can play whatever music they want while being spared the unpleasantness of constant customer service—it’s also basically two people running a ghost kitchen. Here’s your future.
Shaxian Snacks
There are three NYC locations so far of this quasi-mysterious franchise, which boasts a freaky number of worldwide locations. This article from last year says, “Today on the food platform Meituan, there are a staggering 88,000 registered Shaxian Snacks eateries. And the brand has expanded to include 174 outlets in 66 countries and regions.” I don’t understand how you get from that first number to the second without AI levels of trademark fraud. Or, as this article December 2020 puts it, “The restaurant’s Pacman-ish logo is a pretty ubiquitous sight in China, where it’s estimated there are around 60,000 outlets bearing the name. Only around 500 of these cheap eat destinations are officially owned by the parent company however, with the rest belonging to franchisees — something that can result in inconsistencies in just how tasty your peanut butter noodles are from branch to branch.”
I wouldn’t be able to tell you which category the downtown Manhattan location falls into (there are others in downtown Brooklyn and Flushing), although I can tell you that the peanut noodles here are just OK. The hot and sour fatty beef noodle soup (above), however, is an on-point meal for one, and the shrimp-free, ground meat wontons are enjoyable, less for the agreeably bland filling than their unusually long, gossamer-thin wrappers; they’re better boiled than fried. For a place near Metrograph, where seemingly every new eatery is “elevated Chinese” or “Dimes Square wine bar,” it’s also pleasingly zero frills, run by a small group of middle-aged women who barely speak English, with bare walls, functional metallic tables and a TV silently playing a slideshow of menu highlights on a loop. I thought we weren’t allowed to have new spaces like this anymore.
Bites of Xi’an
With a name seemingly deliberately engineered to sow confusion about whether this is just Xi’an Famous Food, some skepticism might be generated by this five-location franchise, whose location near MoMA has become a go-to for me, especially since the Xi’an that used to be in the area has now shut down. Bites’s lamb burger is better than Xi’an’s, with more flavorful meat and a much flakier dough bordering on crescent roll, while the pork dumplings are thick-skinned, small and full of ground meat, closer to Russian pelmeni than what I expect from the (granted, very broad) family of Chinese dumplings. The soups are less exciting but solid, including a stewed beef noodle soup laced with a mild but pleasing amount of Sichuan peppercorn; I look forward to trying the bluntly titled “water basin mutton” soup. Avoid the noodle with stir fried tomato and egg, which has a sugary taste that’s very essence-of-Heinz-ketchup. Again, zero atmosphere (minus the inexplicable decoration of a portable 8-track player on the wall), which in the context of the neighborhood is actually refreshing.
China Xiang
Part of the charm of this Hunanese establishment is that it’s on 42nd St. between 8th and 9th Avenues, a grimly unpromising stretch elevated by this low-key option that you can easily walk into. The dishes Robert Sietsema flagged in his review point to the right path, which basically amounts to “stick to Hunanese”; get the smoked pork with dried turnips, and I suspect that everything else under the “Hunan Special Smoked Pork” is good. The “sautéed farm chicken with ginger” (above) is savory and satisfying for anyone who doesn’t mind gnawing, and the sautéed sour string beans with minced pork and bean curd sheets are solid. Per the “don’t try items that aren’t part of the cuisine” rule, skip the soup dumplings and beer duck, although the Sichuan ox tongue and tripe is surprisingly solid.
Grandma’s Home
And one more franchise making its American debut. Yelp reviewers say this Chelsea location is notably fancier than the Chinese original, which isn’t a surprise. (Although it’s kind of weird that during my visit, 80% of diners were Chinese but not a single server was; is the assumption that non-Chinese patrons at Chinese restaurants don’t want to deal with actual Chinese people?) Grandma’s Home specializes in the cuisine of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, whose food I have zero experience with. That lack of familiarity may well have contributed to how much I enjoyed the meal, which had the advantage of novelty in several new-to-me dishes (minus mapo tofu, boasting a tomato-y note on the verge of bolognese—it was good!).
The show-stopper is the green tea claypot chicken (above, bottom), the second moistest-and-likely-to-fall-apart fowl in the city after Cauldron Chicken, which offers a Henanese chicken so extensively braised that it disintegrates the moment you take a disposable-plastic-gloved hand to its bones. Here, the chicken is in a broth, so when you’re done with the meat you have a bonus chicken soup of sorts. Also excellent: the braised duck leg with five spice app, rendered closer to medium rare than usual in a Chinese restaurant; the non-intuitive but tasty you tiao shrimp app, which is basically crullers full of shrimp paste (above, top); a delightfully salty stir-fried string bean; a subtler than usual bright yellow simmered peppercorn beef. The scallion oil noodles are skippable, but the crispy skin chicken I saw at another table looked great. The portions are a little small for the price, but what else is new? [UPDATE: the crispy skin chicken is very good and invisibly garlicky. The ju ju bao is good—yellow croaker on a bed of a comical amount of garlic cloves and a little minced ginger in soy sauce. But for $38, there should be more than eight small pieces of fish and a little less garlic. But if you enjoy eating comical amounts of soft-roasted garlic…]
The Google Map to date.