Yunnan Kitchen Chinese and draft wine on the LES

Highlighting the flavors of China's most "fertile" province, Yunnan Kitchen uses a "light-handed" approach to reproduce its namesake region's diverse fare, creating bite-size morsels contrasting deftly cooked meats with oft-raw produce, and dishing 'em out to a specially designed communal table surrounded by a collector's den's worth of artifacts: a hanging 19th-century tiger rug, loads of teapots, and, from Beijing, a "Lucky Cat" so... it's a dog?

Fresh ingredients get turned into dishes of fried rice w/ sausage specially made by Salumeria Biellese, thick-spaghetti-sized cold noodles tossed with ground pork & peanuts, skewers sporting lamb meatballs or whole small fish, and a dried beef salad w/ chilies that makes green salads look like total jerkys.

Stepping out with a "highly curated and eclectic" wine program, tap-poured Gotham Project vinos are avail in large format bottles for sharing, and the tight list of draft craft brews includes Abita Turbo Dog, Captain Lawrence Liquid Gold, and Sixpoint's Bengali Tiger, which does what that hanging 19th-century tiger rug no longer can: make you feel comfortable lying on the floor.

Liquids can blow your taste buds' minds as well, with crazy-ass teas running from Pu'erh (a "fermented/oxidized" number with a funky, rich, and sometimes chocolatey taste), to the super-rare, avail-one-month-only elixir pulled from a cleared crop field in China known as "Mountain Grass", something that's often purported to make your man province far from fertile.