THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 9
PHOTOGRAPH BY INA JANG FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Milu
333 Park Avenue South
Where were you during the Great Chili-
Crisp Craze of 2020? It ranks as barely a
blip in that extraordinary year yet still is
useful in defining it. Chili crisp—com-
monly associated with Lao Gan Ma, a
brand started some thirty years ago by a
noodle-shop owner in China’s Guizhou
Province, who became a billionaire
after bottling her recipe—is a thick
and crunchy chili-oil-based condiment
that might include fried garlic, Sichuan
peppercorn, sesame seeds, or fermented
black beans among its ingredients. It
keeps indefinitely and can be used to
perk up just about anything, the ultimate
shortcut for the home cook. Last spring,
it rose to prominence as, arguably, the
condiment of the pandemic. A variety
produced in Chengdu, Sichuan, by a
U.S.-based company called Fly by Jing
became a commodity so hot that there
was a months-long wait list, and Mo-
mofuku’s Chili Crunch sold out within
hours of its début.
In 2021, so far, it’s proving much eas-
ier to obtain. At Milu, a new restaurant
near Madison Square Park that serves
pan-regional Chinese food, a selection
of retail items includes the elusive Fly
by Jing chili crisp and the kitchen’s own
milder, crunchier iteration. The counter-
service restaurant, with a layout that feels
designed to facilitate high turnover and a
menu anchored by “bowls,” was originally
conceived as a lunchtime destination for
office workers. Two of its founders, Con-
nie Chung, who is also the chef, and Vin-
cent Chao, met while working at Make It
Nice, the restaurant group behind Eleven
Madison Park and its erstwhile fast-ca-
sual spinoff Made Nice. The attributes
that set Milu apart in this milieu are also
what suit it to a pandemic.
The chili crisp shares shelf space with
other products for seriously elevating
your pantry: artisanal Taiwanese soy
sauces (one type brewed with pineapple,
another finished over a wood fire) and
soy pastes, jars of house-rendered duck
fat, salted-egg potato chips from Singa-
pore. Then there are the bowls, which
are built with components not randomly
slapped together, to check food-pyramid
boxes, but balletically complementary,
and modular enough that you can’t go
wrong even if you choose to “build your
own.” This is unexpectedly exquisite fast
food that could do wonders to break up
the monotony of a nine-to-five—or a
stretch of health-mandated house arrest.
Milu offers takeout and delivery in Man-
hattan, with plans to expand to Brooklyn.
Silky cubes of salmon are paired with
charred broccoli dressed in a cilantro-yuzu
emulsion. The salmon, in homage to the
style of whole fish served at Cantonese
banquets, is both poached with ginger
and scallion and served with a traditional
ginger-scallion sauce. If ever there was a
condiment that amounted to more than
the sum of its parts, it’s Cantonese-style
ginger-scallion sauce, which, with those
two ingredients—finely minced, heavily
salted, and doused in hot oil—achieves
an alchemical transcendence.
Ginger-scallion sauce (a candidate for
Condiment of 2021?) comes with the
soy-roasted chicken, too. It would work
just as well with the crisp-edged, melt-
ingly marbled chunks of Yunnan-style
brisket, though Milu serves these with a
chili-garlic-mint sauce—plus the most
beautiful marinated cucumbers I’ve
ever seen. In part to maximize surface
area—for soaking up chili-and-roasted-
garlic oil—each cucumber is sliced into
a Slinky-like form, not dissimilar to
the Swedish Hasselback potato cut. In
China, the technique alludes to the struc-
ture of an antique style of straw raincoat,
and it’s often used for formal meals.
Piled on rice, the brisket and cucum-
bers or the salmon and broccoli, each
topped with a handful of watercress-
cilantro salad, is a banquet in a bowl. For
an even more opulent spread, Milu offers
family-style set meals, featuring seaweed-
and-pressed-tofu salad, crackly-skinned
sliced duck leg served with hoisin and
duck-fat rice, and delightfully snappable
chocolate-malt cookies sandwiching a
layer of malt buttercream, a treat among
treats. (Bowls and entrées $11-$26; family-
style set meals $45-$80.)
—Hannah Goldfield
