"This is not the first time one of the chef’s restaurants has been closed by the pandemic. One of last year’s earliest casualties was Little Tong, which shut down in mid-March. This casual East Village cafe focused on Yunnan mixian, but added other fascinating dishes to its rice-noodle agenda from a mountainous province on China’s Southeast Asian border. It featured, for example, the seemingly incongruous steak tartare, flavored with pickled mustard seed and served with a flaky roti. Steak tartare in Yunnan? Well, yes, because that’s where this French-identified dish actually originated, according to Reay Tannahill’s Food in History (1973), which you may choose to believe or not." - Robert Sietsema
