Thomas Chen, an accountant turned cook/chef, is opening his first restaurant tomorrow at 536 E. Fifth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B.
New York magazine has a sneak preview of the 45-seat restaurant "where he’ll meld his classic training and Chinese-American ancestry in a menu filled with seasonal ingredients and Asian accents."
You can find photos of the various dishes here.
Kuboya moved from this space to Cornelia Street back in May. Prior to Kuboya, 536 E. Fifth St. was home to (briefly!) Village East Bistro and Le Gamin.
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Quoting from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential:
"Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses, with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five....The easy answer, of course, is ego. The classic example is the retired dentist who was always told he threw a great dinner party. 'You should open a restaurant,' his friends tell him. And our dentist believes them. He wants to get in the business -- no to make money, not really, but to swan about the dining room signing dinner checks like Rick in Casablanca. ...
Maybe the dentist is having a mid-life crisis. He figures the Bogie Act will help pull the kind of chicks he could never get when he was yanking molars and scraping plaque. You see a lot of this ailment -- perfect reasonable, even shrewd businessmen, hitting their fifties, suddenly writing checks with their cock. And they are not entirely misguided in this; they will probably will get laid. The restaurant business have somewhat relaxed mores about casual sex, and there are more a number of amiably round-heeled waitresses, most of them hopelessly untalented aspiring actresses for whom sexual congresses with older, less attractive guys is not so unfamiliar.
Unsurprisingly, a retired dentist who starts a restaurant for the sex, or to be told he's marvelous, is totally unprepared for the realities of the business. He's completely blindsided when the place doesn't start making money immediately. ... Like some unseen incubus, this evil cloud of failure can hang over a restaurant long after the operation has gone over under, killing anyone who follow. The cumulative vibe of a history of failed restaurants can infect an address year after year, even in an otherwise bustling neighborhood. You can see it when a passerby peer into the front window of the ext operator; there's a scowl, a look of suspicion, as if they are afraid of contamination.
Of Course there are many, operators who do well in the restaurant business, who know what they're doing. They know from the get-go what they want, what they are capable of doing well, and exactly how much it's going to get them at the outset. ... A smart operator will, when he realizes things haven't worked out, fold up his tent and move on -- before he's knocked out of the game for good. ..."
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