A New Neighborhood Gets a Local
What’s that they say — history repeats, first as tragedy, then as forks? Truer words never misquoted. New York neighborhoods aren’t born so much as they’re reborn on the ashes of their predecessors, and grimy areas of avoidance become the site of the new hot boîte. Your Meatpacking Districts, your Tribecas — they all tell the story. Now it’s far-western Soho’s turn.
These streets were once stand-ins for the worst New York had to offer. In Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, the leather bar Griffin Dunne stumbles into on his long night’s journey into day is the old Emerald Pub at 308 Spring Street, and a pretty bartender played by Teri Garr lives across the street at 307.
I, too, stumbled into 307 Spring recently. The apartments have sailed out of barmaid territory, and the ground floor is home to a sprightly restaurant called Kiko, which packs in the neighborhood’s new denizens for after-work shiso-litchi highballs and lobster crispy rice. The restaurant, which opened in November 2024, is an early arrival to what looks to be New York’s newest fine-dining neighborhood. Flynn McGarry’s Cove just opened on West Houston, and Daniel Humm has signed a lease a little ways north at 435 Hudson. César Ramirez, another early adopter, opened his $400-a-head tasting-menu den last year.
Development bulldozes the best of us. As long as the area stalwarts — the blessed Ear Inn, chef Ned Baldwin’s ever-reliable Houseman — remain, a few new arrivals such as Kiko won’t be unwelcome. The thousands of office workers peopling Google’s St. John’s Terminal campus and Disney’s blocklong Robert A. Iger Building, both of which opened in 2024, need to go somewhere, and Kiko, more than many of its tonier neighbors, is available for the kind of few-bites, few-drinks socializing that happens in business districts. You can make a full dinner here, easily, but you can also slug a few oysters or a tuna tartare and be done.
After what seemed like a slow start, Kiko is now buzzing. The restaurant comes from the husband-and-wife chef-and-sommelier team of Alex Chang and Lina Goujjane. Chang has the requisite stints at international hot spots (L.A.’s Animal, Mexico City’s Pujol); Goujjane comes from a restaurant family (owners of One If By Land, Two If By Sea for decades). All of that experience has filtered into the warm, romantic dining room, a bit ryokan-chalet, with bare-wood accents and a crackling fireplace. The menu can skew ambitious and attention grabbing ($46 Dungeness crab with crab-fat mayo) when desired and approachable (deep-fried chicken wings) when not.
I don’t turn up my nose at wings and certainly not at Chang’s, which are as stickily and sweetly fried as any you’ll find in Koreatown. Candied in a blanket of ginger and yuzu kosho and fried I don’t want to know how many times, they are a vivid, Ninja Turtle green, thanks to an ample dusting of makrut-lime-leaf powder.
That’s not to suggest that Kiko is a new-look Hooters. Though the menu caroms a little widely for my taste — Italianate mafaldine with mushrooms, even with the twist of fermented black beans, didn’t make much sense — there’s clearly sophistication and tact exercised here. (It’s been a while since I’ve been to a Hooters, but I don’t recall it making its own gently wobbling silken tofu.) It’s more that Chang flexes his finesse in ways that don’t insist upon attention being paid. Thai-style red curry poured over a little hillock of lightly fried lobster crispy rice is plenty flavorful, but it doesn’t demand reverence; you don’t even need to pause your conversation. I spied a whole-fried black bass sitting up and staring the two women who ordered it dead in the face. They continued chatting merrily.
The ascetics can skip the bass in favor of a butterflied sea bream, but why, when there are slices of pork secreto (the cut of the moment, judging by how often I see it on restaurant menus) marinated until tender in coconut and served alongside a few chunks of spicy pineapple, the rare entrée that conjures both Hawaiian pizza and a piña colada?
Enjoyment with a soupçon of serious-ness: That’s what Kiko is good for. Sometimes you just have to wait and the moment catches up. A year ago, Kiko was a swing, then it became a discovery. The neighborhood is bubbling up around it now. Its hour is here.