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"I can’t remember the last time I was served crispy beef by someone with a tattoo," whispered Mrs. Platt as we wedged ourselves into one of the long communal tables at the boisterous newfangled Chinese restaurant RedFarm, which opened a couple of months ago on Hudson Street in the West Village. The brightly lit little townhouse space is built with wooden rafters and banquettes, and decorated here and there with familiar casual barnyard touches like wooden packing crates, dangling candles, and the kinds of flowerpots you see hanging in the courtyard homes of old Chinese houses. There were plenty of tattooed diners, too, sitting at the long tables, which were set with mismatched chairs as in a country kitchen. They sipped fashionable, non-Chinese cocktails like the RedFarm Manhattan, and picked at thick, American-style egg rolls stuffed with Katz’s pastrami, and dishes with antic names like Shu Mai Shooters.

RedFarm is bankrolled by that ubiquitous restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow (China Grill, Asia de Cuba), but the concept belongs to the great czar of New York’s increasingly moribund Chinese-food scene, Ed Schoenfeld. Schoenfeld has had a hand in numerous Chinese dining trends over the decades (the seventies establishment he managed, Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan, launched the General Tso’s chicken craze on an unsuspecting city), and he’s been involved with many high-profile Chinese restaurants, including Shun Lee Palace and Chinatown Brasserie. As the catchy name indicates, RedFarm is an attempt to update the ancient, tired formulas and market them to the new, more casual generation of big-city diners. This means, among other things, that there are no reservations at this “farm style” Chinese restaurant, and that the bistro-style one-page menu is imbued with what the proprietors eagerly describe as a “Greenmarket style” sensibility.

Fusion concepts like this are filled with many potential pitfalls, but Schoenfeld had the good sense to enlist the talents of the great Hong Kong dim sum chef Joe Ng, with whom he worked at Chinatown Brasserie. Ng’s cooking is playful and fresh, and although some of his forward-thinking creations veer off the rails, most of the food is a cut above the kind of run-of-the-mill cooking you see these days down in Chinatown. I didn’t discern any Greenmarket qualities in my fatty, slightly leaden pastrami egg roll (served with a nice honey-mustard and kaffir-lime sauce), but Mrs. Platt’s brittle, deliciously candied spicy crispy-beef appetizer was so good that I ordered it on my next visit. Ditto the classic, Shanghai-style pork-and-crab soup dumplings, and the impressive, football-size RedFarm chicken salad, which is tossed with mounds of lettuce and fresh corn and spiked with giant spears of asparagus.

Several of Ng’s larger, entrée-style ­dishes tend to have the same treacly-sweet flavor profile, and some of them work better than others. The glutinously gooey claypot chicken tasted like something you’d find in a not very good Thai restaurant in Guangdong. I couldn’t stop eating the sugary grilled short ribs with cauliflower and broccoli, however, or the slippery chunks of black cod, which Ng cooks with fresh yellow leeks and serves with a pot of housemade XO sauce on the side. The menu includes professional renditions of old favorites like cashew shrimp, and a meltingly tender version of smoked chicken (served as a special) that Ng smokes in a wok with brown sugar and jasmine tea. Even at this hipster Chinese restaurant, the desserts are negligible, but if you have to get one, Mrs. Platt suggests the mousse, flavored, imaginatively enough, with litchi. — Adam Platt

Ideal Meal

Spicy crispy beef or soup dumplings, sautéed black cod, lobster with pork and egg, tea-smoked chicken (special).

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New York Magazine Reviews

• Adam Platt's Full Review (10/17/11)

Best of New York Awards

• Best Chicken (2012)

Featured In

• Adam Platt’s Where to Eat 2013 (12/31/12)
• New Restaurants on Hudson Street (8/22/11)