A little more than a year ago, after running a successful pop-up called Ha’s Đặc Biệt, the chefs Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha opened Ha’s Snack Bar, an itsy-bitsy restaurant on the Lower East Side. The Snack Bar, like the pop-up, served Vietnamese-inspired dishes that were clever, cheffy (and more than a bit French-inflected), and utterly cool without any sort of hauteur. From just about the instant it opened, the place became a monstrous hit—dramatically, fervidly, almost disorientingly. Enormous crowds gathered outside the Broome Street storefront in the hope of being chosen to occupy a spare stool. Social media was relentless, traditional media breathless. (When Burns and Ha learned, around this time last year, that I would be reviewing the Snack Bar, they very politely reached out to ask if I could please not.) Still, from the beginning, they were clear that the Snack Bar was just a first step on their brick-and-mortar journey—not their “real” restaurant, as such, but a staging ground from which to figure out a grander opening to come. Now, exactly twelve months later, they’ve opened Bistrot Ha, just around the corner.
The new place is small, by most measures, though vastly larger than the Snack Bar, with a dozen marble-topped tables that tend to be populated by interesting-looking people wearing blunt bobs and enviable knitwear. As at Ha’s Snack Bar, the food is an elegant wallop of neon flavors, foregrounding the punctilious greenness of Vietnamese herbs and the languorous funk of organ meats and offcuts, but now there’s room to breathe, to relax a little, to take it all in, to linger. There’s a neat stainless-steel bar running along one wall at which you could, in theory, nurse a glass of some minerally Old World red, or a ballet-pink lychee cosmo, though for the moment its seats are all given over to diners having a full meal. There’s even a coat check, by Jove! And unlike the Snack Bar, whose alcove-like kitchen runs on just a hot plate and an electric oven, Bistrot Ha has a more built-out setup, allowing Ha and Burns to sear and broil and finish dishes à la minute to their hearts’ content. The relationship between the two spaces reminds me of the way chic Parisian restaurants sometimes operate accessory caves à vin—more casual wine bars, often sharing the same kitchen but serving noshier food. One Burns-Ha restaurant is a snack bar, and the other’s a bistro(t), and the existence of each allows the other to be more unadulteratedly itself.
The chefs Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns.
