GN Chan and Faye Chen of Double Chicken Please Like Boozy Drinks and All of the Noodle Soups
To-Go Takes is Resy’s regular feature wherein we quiz the folks behind some of our favorite restaurants about all things related to takeout.
In this edition, we speak to GN Chan and Faye Chen, the bar mavens behind the Lower East Side’s latest cocktail-and-chicken sandwich hotspot Double Chicken Please, currently open for outdoor dining, pickup and delivery. Below, they share some of their favorite takeout tips, tricks, cocktails, and regular stops.
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Restaurant: Double Chicken Please
Name + Title: GN Chan and Faye Chen, Co-Founders
Resy: What are your favorite dishes and cocktails from Double Chicken Please’s takeout menu?
Faye Chen: My favorite dish is our brand-new chicken liver mousse. We serve it in a jar and it comes with bread.
GN Chan: There’s a lot of booze inside [laughs]. You have Madeira, you have ruby Port, you have apple brandy, and the fat cap at the top, the butter, is from another drink: coffee mushroom whiskey butter. It’s delicious. That’s Faye’s. But for me, I would say it’s one of the signature sandwiches — the salted duck yolk sandwich. For cocktails, definitely #6. It’s kind of like a Michelada — a sort of Bloody Mary with beer, very Mexican — and we made our own version with absinthe to get a little bit of licorice and jalapeño. Overall, it’s something really refreshing, really easy to drink, and savory. It goes well with the sandwich, too.
Faye: I like #9 or #7. Oh god, I can’t decide [laughs]. Yeah, I like boozy drinks, and #9 is the booziest one on the menu. It’s got fruity notes and is floral-ish, I really like it.
Where are you getting takeout from and what are you ordering?
GN: My first spot is Madame Vo in the East Village. It’s a Vietnamese pho place, and I usually go there for their bun bo hue. It reminds me of beef noodle soup from Taiwan, but slightly different. And I really like their rice noodles. I grab takeout there basically every week.
Faye: I just had the beef noodle set from 886. They have this beef soup that they freeze — the packaging is super cute — and you can just bring it home, put it in the freezer, and reheat. It’s super easy and simple and good.
GN: Another place is Pâtisserie Fouet. It’s actually our sister restaurant and a dessert place, but they do serve really good hot food, too. There’s this beef stew — a very buttery, slow-cooked beef stew — and it’s really yummy.
Now that temperature have dropped, what cold-weather food are you looking forward to ordering the most?
GN: Raku, because they serve big bowls of udon. It’s so comforting when the weather is cold out. You’ll just see people put their hands on the bowl to keep warm, it’s like it’s their heater.
Faye: Anything spicy sounds tempting. Fish Cheeks!
GN: Fish Cheeks has some of the best Thai food in the city. It’s spicy but it’s so freaking good. Their crab curry is so spicy to the point where I can’t really eat much, but I still order it.
Faye: Just to keep you warm.
What’s your favorite place for cocktails to go?
GN: I like Mace. Mace’s to-go cocktails are pretty awesome. I really like the Sakura, it’s really yummy. Or the Mace drink, with beets, is really good too. Our neighbor, Bar Goto, also has really good drinks to go.
Faye: Angel’s Share.
What single dish would you walk miles for?
GN: Wow, this is a hard one, I don’t really walk [laughs]. I would say RedFarm in the West Village. It’s a place I love, I really like the food. One of my favorites is a small piece of filet mignon on a small tart with asparagus and corn. It’s just one bite, but for me it’s a perfect bar food.
Faye: If I really have to walk, there’s a seafood restaurant, Upstate in the East Village. They have really good seafood — I love the oysters and wine.
GN: And their desserts are good, too. Their whiskey bread! They only give you one piece — they don’t sell it so you can’t order more!
What was your first meal back once restaurants reopened?
GN: Definitely one of the restaurants we just mentioned. Fish Cheeks? I feel like we went to Fish Cheeks.
Faye: Yeah, and we talked about outdoor seating.
GN: Oh, we went to Bohemian! It’s a Japanese restaurant in the East Village. Do you know the Japanese Premium Beef shop? It’s behind that, almost like a speakeasy restaurant. We went there because they started doing outdoor seating. I really like their food.
What do you miss the most about restaurants?
Faye: I really miss all the indoor dining. Especially in this cold weather. That’s my memory for the past few years in New York: Every night there’d always be lots of people outside of restaurants waiting for a seat. I could feel that they knew they’d get the meal they wanted, and they were so excited. They were okay waiting for that feeling of sitting down and having a good time with friends and family. I think that’s the part I miss the most, because right now, you always have to check if a restaurant is open, if they have outdoor seating… It’s not that easy.
GN: From the restaurant side, it’s the interaction with people. It’s something that’s really hard to replicate for outdoor seating, because of the weather, the setup, everything is different from indoor. I miss that interaction, I miss how much attention we can give to the guest, to make their night special. When we opened, we had a couple propose in our space. Those kinds of special moments for people, it’s so much easier to make it happen when indoor dining is allowed.
