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Eddie Huang Is Cooking in New York Again
Photo: KC Armstrong/Deadline via Getty Images
Eddie Huang is a wife guy now. After time in Taiwan and L.A., Huang is back in New York, hosting a podcast with his spouse, Natashia Blanca, and, starting Wednesday, cooking once more — albeit in a different way than he did at the long-running Baohaus or the short-lived Xiao Ye (“an artful misfire,” per the Times). Huang is cooking with olive oil now, thanks in part to Blanca, whose family shares its annual olive harvest from a plot in Greece. “Her mom would send a big container, maybe a ten-gallon container, of olive oil,” Huang says, “and I was like, What am I going to do with this? I don’t cook Mediterranean food.” Huang’s solution was to use it for cooking Chinese food. But to work with the oil’s low smoke point, he had to rethink some classic heat-blasted Chinese recipes, so he developed new techniques, like crisping Iberico pork for a stir-fry over binchotan charcoal before slicing it into strips and lightly frying it in olive oil with cured tofu and peppers.
Until recently, Huang only cooked like this for meals with Blanca and their 21-month-old son, Senna, at home. But now Huang is ready to showcase his new style for a summer pop-up, Gazebo, at the Flower Shop on Eldridge Street. That’s where I met Huang, wearing his signature jade Buddha chain and a cap embroidered with overlapping watch brands, to talk about the project.
Our conversation didn’t last long because Huang soon jumped into the kitchen. From my vantage at the bar, I could see him working alongside the regular staff preparing for that night’s service. He spent almost an hour cooking, appearing sporadically to drop off a dish for me to try before heading back to work on the next one. For skate wing, he first grills it before simmering the seafood in a chile, mustard-green sauce, à la sauerkraut fish. Huang calls it “very Chengdu,” though “they wouldn’t do skate wing in Chengdu, but I really like it as the canvas for this type of preparation.”
Huang met the Flower Shop’s owner, Dylan Hales — buff, Australian, dripping in metal jewelry over a black Guns n’ Roses T-shirt — three weeks ago, through their mutual friend, the designer Maxwell Osborne, while Huang and his wife were looking for a new space to record their podcast. “I didn’t know they had food,” Huang says, “and it’s actually very, very good. I was like, ‘Bro, this kitchen is incredible.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, you should do something here.’”
Photo: Gazebo
Now the two are partners in Gazebo, the restaurant, named after an Italo Disco song Huang plays for his son every night. “We’ve done pop-ups before,” says Hales, “usually one night or one weekend or a barbecue. This is definitely the most in-depth and thoughtful thing that we’ve done. It requires a lot of work to integrate the menu into what we already do on a regular day-to-day basis. A lot.”
Not everything is cooked: I loved a combination of scallop dressed in a slight pool of something that looked and prickled like red vinegar but was actually leche de tigre, a blend of red onion, lime, and scotch bonnet pepper. The scallop was finished with a grating of Marcona almonds that gave it a nice roast-y note. Huang’s also been working on a quesadilla made of two corn tortillas filled with pork and cherrystone clams and glued together with white cheddar. It’s a nice piece of bar food and a big change from the food I would have expected from Huang.
His restaurant Baohaus remained open until October 2020, but by that point, Huang had become more famous for visiting other people’s kitchens for Vice, or for his memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, and the ABC show it became. He spent 2020 in Taiwan before relocating to Los Angeles around the release of his film, Boogie, which came out in 2021, and started his family in the intervening years. While Gazebo’s overall concept is Chinese food, the menu will be interspersed with ideas that “have been percolating for 12 years of traveling the world, getting to meet and hang with different chefs,” Huang explains. The scallop dish was inspired by Javier Wong, a legend of ceviche, which Huang tried in Peru while filming Huang’s World. The quesadilla, meanwhile, is based on a snack he made for his son with leftover clams and Iberico pork from recipe testing.
A generous portion of pickled orange mustard stems show up as a garnish on the final dish Huang shows me, Taiwanese beef noodle soup. The broth is crystalline, mildly spiced and tangy. The braised strip loin is wagyu; the noodles are spaghetti. It’s a combination he discovered doing during his last visit to Taiwan. “We love it, because it’s bouncier. It’s more al dente,” Huang says. “I became known amongst my group of friends in Taiwan as spaghetti beef noodle soup.”
Gazebo
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