House of the Red Pearl
Chinese restaurant · Financial District ·
Hidden speakeasy serving refined Chinese dishes & cocktails
Hidden speakeasy serving refined Chinese dishes & cocktails
"You get to this hidden Chinese-inspired spot in the Tin Building by going through a curtain at the back of Asian goods store Mercantile East. The dining room has lantern-like light fixtures and a huge mural of scenes from a Chinese village—design choices that feel extremely cheesy at best. Still, House of the Red Pearl has our favorite food at the Tin Building. Their top dish is a take on peking duck with crispy skin that we can’t stop thinking about. The experience leans upscale, and the room is relatively quiet, so it’s also a good place to take parents." - kenny yang, matt tervooren, hannah albertine, molly fitzpatrick
"House of the Red Pearl is a speakeasy-ish Chinese-inspired spot that you enter through a curtain at the back of the Asian goods store in Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Tin Building. The dining room has lantern-like light fixtures and a huge mural of scenes from a Chinese village—design choices that, at best, feel extremely cheesy. Still, this place has our favorite food at the Tin Building. Their top dish is a take on Peking duck, which comes with soy-glazed breast meat and a confit quarter leg with crispy skin that we can’t stop thinking about. If you work nearby, this restaurant would work well for a business dinner. The experience leans upscale, the space is relatively quiet, and there's a semi-private room in case you want to do a team outing." - Kenny Yang
"We entered the House of the Red Pearl through a curtained door at the back of the Asian grocery into a rather grand, cocktail-lounge-y room with booths, circular tables and many hanging lamps; the staff wear stiff Mao-style jackets and the place is explicitly meant to evoke a James Bond/Dr. No world, a theme that made us slightly uneasy. The menu is modern and faultlessly prepared: soy-marinated cucumber salad, shrimp-and-pork Sichuan wontons, an egg-drop soup heaped with greens, a somewhat too-oniony moist Chongqing chicken, excellent steamed pea shoots in butter with crunchy shallots and caramelized garlic, and a wok-fried cumin lamb that may be the best NYC version of this adapted Uyghur dish—overall the most ambitious restaurant in the Tin Building and, for me, maybe the best, though we left $135 poorer." - Robert Sietsema
"About a week after Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened his large Seaport marketplace, I consider the Chinese restaurant House of the Red Pearl to be the breakout hit of the development, echoing New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo’s assessment." - Erika Adams
"Tucked into a corner that feels almost secret, this Chinese restaurant features dishes like vegetable peanut tofu-skin spring rolls, longevity noodles, and stir-fried cumin lamb with chiles." - Melissa McCart
