Bonnie's

At Bonnie’s, MSG Is Wielded with Nuanced Artistry | The New Yorker

"Set in Williamsburg, Bonnie’s flips the MSG stigma by embracing it: the cocktails include an MSG Martini (a healthy shake of the seasoning with olive brine, Shaoxing wine, and vodka or gin that I found reminiscent of A.1. steak sauce), and almost everything on the menu is enhanced with MSG—the L.L.C. is even called MSG 88, a name printed on egg-custard-yellow hoodies. Chef-owner Calvin Eng, who learned Cantonese cooking from his mother Bonnie, wields MSG with nuanced artistry rather than as a shortcut, and the food explodes with flavor. The Yeung Yu Sang Choi Bao, a deboned and stuffed whole rainbow trout ($53), is painstakingly prepared—bones and flesh removed, the flesh ground with shrimp, garlic chives, and water chestnuts, whipped into a bouncy paste, encased in the preserved skin, grilled, sliced into eight neat segments and served to be wrapped in lettuce with herbs and a ginger-scallion purée. A poached half chicken, Bak Cheet Gai, arrives sliced and fanned cold atop warm rice, glistening with golden chicken fat and accompanied by teacups of Gai Tong (chicken broth redolent of ginger and white pepper) that I loved and sometimes ordered a whole teapot of as a palate cleanser between bites of long beans—delightfully sweet, shrivelled, clanging with garlic and topped with croutons made from a savory cruller—and scorching-hot Cheung Fun, seared rolled rice noodles sticky on the outside and custardy within, the XO sauce (from dried scallops and shrimp) punctuated by fennel seed. Booking the boisterous dining room on Resy is Sisyphean, though the bar and outdoor seating take walk-ins; on one night my fruit plate even came with a round of shots." - Hannah Goldfield