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FeedChinese Laundry
Sex meets sate at John Elkhay’s newest venture, Chinese Laundry, and it’s a happy—albeit tawdry—marriage.
Photography by Angel Tucker
Chinese Laundry 
121 North Main Street, Providence, 272-8676, chineselaundryri.com. Open for dinner Tuesday though Saturday. Reservations accepted for private dining on the lower level. Wheelchair accessible only in main dining room. Valet as well as limited street parking. Cuisine Modern Asian with a full bar, including nearly a dozen sake varieties, fifteen wines by the glass and nine signature cocktails. Capacity Twenty in the lounge, thirty downstairs. There’s room for fifteen more in the private dining room. Vibe Soft-core porn meets your local Chinese restaurant. Prices Appetizers $3–$16, entrees $13–$50 Karen’s picks Twelve-hour moo shu pork belly, sate of Chilean sea bass, tuna pizza, Peking duck potstickers.
Key Fair Good Very Good Excellent Half-star
Naked knows no ethnic boundaries. Consequently, Asian fare is fair game for John Elkhay, who has adorned his Far-East venture, Chinese Laundry, with quite a few snapshots of people who don’t appear to like eating. Unless they do it in the buff. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s spent a Saturday night at Ten Prime Steak and Sushi or seen XO’s expose advertising hovering over I-95. The Chow Fun Group reveres style over all else, defining their restaurants with over-the-top ambience that draws diners who delight in a hedonistic approach.
It’s no wonder that Elkhay relies on Executive Chef Nick Rabar, who must manage not only the kitchen staff but the invisible “sous chef”: image. Dishes rely as much on aesthetics as the restaurants themselves, and half the diminutive dim sum dishes here look as if they’re lounging on a bed.
Oh, did I mention the bed? Let’s rewind a bit.
Chinese Laundry is an Americanized gem, glimmering with lights and painted in deep red and black lacquer. All three floors are somewhat precious (in a garter belt and hose kind of way), holding about twenty-five closely knit revelers on each level. The bottom floor is reserved for private dining, street level holds the bar and a banquette-style dining area, and the third floor offers lounge chairs and a futon-style bed for—uh—horizontal diners. You can’t accuse Elkhay and his partners, Cheryl and Rick Bready, of awe-inspiring innovation given that B.E.D. opened in Miami a decade ago. But experience has made Chow Fun successful and, for better or worse, trends often arrive in our small state a few years after they hit the major metropolises.
Across from the bed is one of the aforementioned photos, advertising explicit goods for mammary aficionados everywhere. It’s rather difficult to avert one’s eyes but, then again, most of the waitstaff seem to value their own on-display epidermises as well. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to start peeling off your clothes in public, this might just be your venue. Naturally, the wine and sake list (modest in size by most standards) might help diminish inhibitions. But it’s the house cocktails that truly embody the vibe: flashy but coquettish, where truffle vodka is mixed with kumquat syrup and Hangar One with lychee juice.
The cuisine pulls mainly from Chinese and Japanese influence, though Thai also makes an occasional appearance. The service is often astonishingly quick, in part because the tiny tables can only hold two dishes at a time. With six dishes ordered one night, I played a bit of revolving-door dining: eat, swap, eat, swap. Think of it as a fast-food tasting menu.
Given that the dishes were designed around the abbreviated space, it’s not surprising that the appetizers are refined and well worth their price; the entrees, not always. Nearly all are American adaptations of Asian favorites, so don’t expect to bring your friends from overseas and have them wistfully remembering mom’s mackerel soup. Rabar’s menu has a California vibe, beginning with the black truffle nigiri, a bite-sized ball of sushi rice cradling a home-fried potato chip and a caper-sized mound of black truffle. At $10 for a single gulp, it’s a luxury, and a heavily designed one given that the starch is merely a superfluous vessel for the prized mushroom.
Other sashimi and nigiri are slightly more traditional: a variety of tunas, barbecued eel and the ever-popular hamachi (yellowtail). Maki includes a barely cooked bass that utilizes miso and tomato concasse instead of the ubiquitous kappa for crunch. Certainly pleasant though not compulsory.
Among my favorites is the barely cooked sea bass sate on skewers, prepared with an ever-so-subtle peanut sauce and served on a bed of tangy, tangled mustard greens: Asian influence meets southern-American divinity. Greens, incidentally, are strong here, so even if pea tendrils (like mustard greens) seem out of place, go ahead and order them. The bass is outdone only by a stellar twelve-hour pork belly that was born to be made into two delicate hoisin-basted moo shu pancakes with pickled cucumbers. Tender with fat and lush with flavor, it’s a dish that trumps the original by a notable margin. I couldn’t help but order them on each subsequent visit. Rounding out my top three is the tuna pizza that appears to be the darling of every staff member. A grilled tortilla is topped with thin slabs of raw tuna, sliced jalapenos and a squiggle of everyone’s favorite spicy tekka sauce. Pair it with a cocktail on a warm summer night and all you need is a fight to the death for one of the few outdoor tables.
Some of the more substantial dishes (in both size and price) are out of place in a restaurant that barely condones tables, let alone a full supply of silverware. Large bowls of pad Thai can become difficult to maneuver if your table is a six-inch-wide sawhorse, though servers do their best to accommodate. (“I don’t mind waiting on you,” said one fishnet-clad server, “as long as you’re not waiting on me.”) Pad Thai holds a special place in my heart as it was my introduction to Thai food twenty years ago and the first bite was a culinary revelation. Chinese Laundry’s version is far less diverse in flavor: dominated by salt and unidentifiable acid without any discernible curry heat or nam pla. Add some overly salted Alaskan crab and the $20 price tag may be mandatory, but it’s a mere shadow
of a dish that I love with nostalgic fervor.
Lobster fried rice is better, in part because individual dishes saved me from hovering over a large bowl like the recipient of a steam facial. The rice was salted aggressively but not painfully and the lobster managed to withstand the seasoning. Pair it with vegetable tempura or edamame and you’ve made a meal. (Pass on the Hunan eggplant with its spongy flesh and bitter skin.) Meats are simply too much of a challenge unless you’ve scored one of the dinner tables on the first floor. The mammoth short rib ($27) had little Asian authority and required skillful shredding with chopsticks given the scarcity of knives. The Kobe tenderloin cooked on a stone hibachi is more entertaining, though, in a lounge chair, the prospect of dropping a $20 slice of meat on the floor is debilitating.
Chinese Laundry doesn’t serve dessert, a fact I find both surprising and disappointing. If you’re going to sell romance with dark space, alcohol and small bites, an array of diminutive sweets seems the next logical step. True, after several cocktails, your companion may overlook the smell of wasabi emanating from your mouth, but some ginger-infused chocolate or a coconut cream would solve the problem quickly. To be fair, conscientious servers will bring dessert over from Elkhay’s neighboring restaurant, XO, but then the bamboo-papered doors will need to be thrown open and the rest of the world might get in.
That’s the thing: Most of Chinese Laundry’s customers do seem to be in on the joke. Many can laugh good-naturedly at the prospect of reclining on a bed without spilling gyoza sauce all over themselves (relative chance: 6 percent). The unexpectedly diverse group doesn’t seem to fit any standard demographic other than the desire to spend the night warming up their date or beginning the search for a new one. That’s not to say that food isn’t fun at Elkhay’s latest outpost but, in this case, it’s never going to be more than a small part of the experience.
