This New Prospect Heights Restaurant Spotlights Fujianese Cuisine and Community

One of the founders of MáLà Project, Evan Toretto Li, originally from Fujian, has honed his skills at city hotspots like Tim Ho Wan, Pinch Chinese, and Cafe China since moving to New York in 2006. All the while, he’s been preparing to open his place, Nin Hao, in Prospect Heights (609 Dean Street, near Vanderbilt Avenue), opening on Saturday, September 14.

Those searching for Fujianese cuisine — known for its light yet rich flavors and seafood-focused dishes — can find it at Manhattan Chinatown hotspots such as Shu Jiao Fu Zhou and New Arping Restaurant. Most Fujianese reside in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where many entered the restaurant industry after an immigration boom during the 1980s. (Today, East Broadway and Eldridge Street stretch is known as Little Fuzhou.)

In opening Nin Hao in Prospect Heights, Li is banking on drawing a crowd in an untested neighborhood. Li, who grew up in China between Fujian and Hunan, wanted his cuisine reflected in the new wave of Chinese restaurants. “There’s more to Chinese cuisine than just Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese,” he says. “A lot of people who work in Chinese restaurants are Fujianese, but they rarely present their own culture.” He says he opened here for its family-oriented feel, strong neighborhood community, and proximity to Barclays Center.

Housed on the first floor of a two-tower development, Nin Hao shows off a sunlit 60-seat dining room, designed by New York-based architectural firm Plan Plan. A zen aquarium resides behind the bar. Austrian curtains drape windows. Jeremy Morrow made the restaurant’s minimalist red and green tables, where mahjong tiles will serve as chopstick holders. At the back of the restaurant, a sprawling, hand-painted dragon mural by Taiwanese illustrator Chemin Hsiao weaves together 23 stories from the artist’s life.

Li likens the dining room to a chameleon, where he envisions Nin Hao as a place for food, community, and performance. Many of his employees are designers, filmmakers, and musicians eager to bring their talents to space. “This place is meant to be a platform for people here to shine their passion,” he says while hinting at the possibility of a Nin Hao band.

To see his vision, you only have to look up. The grid ceiling, akin to something found in an Off-Broadway theater, will inevitably be used to hang decorations for a future performance, a film screening, or a disco ball for a celebratory night with Fujianese bites.

Laurent Hsia/Nin Hao

Chef Kim Hui Teo runs the kitchen: He is an alum of Red Farm and New York’s first Tim Ho Wan, where he served as executive dim sum chef. As a Malaysian-Fujianese, Teo has crafted a sizable menu with both popular and lesser-known Fujianese dishes. There are taro pork rice balls, tender beef short ribs, and dime-sized wontons with delicate wrappers made from lean pork. The menu also highlights specialty ingredients from Fujian, including tiny briny oysters in the seafood pancake, and Bombay duck, a melt-in-your-mouth fish, deep-fried and showered with bits of garlic. Starters will be priced around $12 to $18 while main dishes will fall in the $30 to $65 range.

While Fujianese dishes are the focus, the menu is not exclusive to this coastal region. Teo also cooks tingly mapo tofu and a mountain jelly salad, thin strips of crunchy yet tender vegetables dressed in a savory soy sauce. Li’s mother, Xi Jin Lin, also came aboard as a kitchen consultant. Her signature glass noodles with generous chunks of Vancouver crab are also on the menu.

Like the new wave Chinese restaurants such as Phoenix Palace and Tolo, Nin Hao offers a varied wine list, with wine directors swapping every few months to keep the program fresh. The first few months belong to Zwann Grays, a star sommelier who once served as Olmsted’s wine director and overlapped with Li at Pinch Chinese. Her inaugural list will spotlight women winemakers, many of whom she knows personally. “This is a place for everyday people, and so the wines are everyday wines,” says Grays. “We want to have fun with loose pairings.”

The restaurant’s cocktails, all priced at $17, will reflect the ingredients of Chinese cities or provinces. There will be Sichuan peppercorn-infused baijiu in the “Chengdu” cocktail, osmanthus and plum flavors in “Hangzhou,” and inventive drinks that utilize pickled chicken feet and scallion pancakes.

Li wants Nin Hao to become a model for sustainable restaurant practices, a vast improvement from his own harried experiences in hospitality. In his first restaurant job in high school, he struggled to connect with older coworkers as the youngest staff member. At another job, his manager told him to disregard his mental health. A watershed moment for him was when he was fired for giving a regular customer a free bottle of Pellegrino.

Nin Hao’s staff will rotate responsibilities and collaborate on events to create an environment that prioritizes mental health and work-life balance. “We’re trying to build a new working culture for the younger generation,” says Li.

Some neighbors are excited about the place. Clare Ngai-Howard, a Prospect Heights resident who attended the restaurant’s neighborhood party on Sunday, has been patiently waiting for the restaurant to open for a year.

“I’m personally so excited about the opening of a Fujianese restaurant since it’s where my parents are from,” she says. “[The seafood pancake] tasted just like how my grandma used to make it for us in Fuzhou.”

Nin Hao is open every day Sunday through Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Reservations will be available through Resy starting October 1.

Laurent Hsia/Nin Hao