Ed Schoenfeld, co-owner of RedFarm, an unassuming New York hotspot that promises “Chinese cuisine with greenmarket sensibility”, sits at a table in his restaurant, sinking his teeth into a pastrami egg roll. Schoenfeld is something of an anomaly — a Jewish guy from Brooklyn who has reached the summit of the Chinese food world. His smattering of Cantonese has what he calls “a Brooklyn accent,” and on this day he is clad in red suspenders, a red-striped shirt and red-rimmed glasses. (He earned the vaguely mobsterish nickname “Eddie Glasses” because he has the same outfit in eight different colors.) At 62, the serial restaurateur and restless impresario is lauded as an authority on haute Chinese cuisine.
Indeed, RedFarm, which has been open for less than a year, serves such offbeat dishes as Pac-Man dumplings and Kowloon filet mignon tarts. It may be, however, the auspicious Year of the Dragon, which begins on January 23, that proves Schoenfeld’s most successful. With RedFarm as the flagship, Schoenfeld plans to revolutionize Chinese delivery in New York and to develop a premier, nationally recognized Asian grocery line, placing him among the ranks of Jewish Chinese food moguls like Eddie Scher, creator of the Soy Vay sauces, and the Epstein family, founders of Kari-Out, the largest distributor of soy sauce packets in America. In the more immediate future, he hopes to bring a new RedFarm restaurant to a major epicenter of Jewish Chinese fressing — Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Schoenfeld studied with the aristocratic Grace Chu, who had reportedly served dinner to Stalin as the wife of a Kuomintang military attaché who helped run the embassy in Moscow. He worked as a host at Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan, a four-star restaurant that helped introduce Hunan cuisine to America, wearing “the world’s tackiest polyester blue tuxedo with pattern fabric… in a ruffled shirt with a blue bow tie.” At one point, a prominent Chinese restaurateur asked Schoenfeld to drive around with him and point out all the Jewish neighborhoods — targets for an expanding empire of Szechuan restaurants. “It was kind of like joining a fraternity. They hazed me endlessly when I first started,” Schoenfeld said of being white (and Jewish) in a Chinese-dominated world. In one restaurant, he said, “if a customer was a bad tipper, the pejorative for him was jautaai [‘Jew’ in Cantonese].”
Over the past four decades, Schoenfeld has helped shape the development of Chinese food in America. From the Shun Lee restaurants to Pig Heaven, the elegant Auntie Yuan and the classic Chinatown Brasserie, he has served as concept creator, talent scout, taster and public relations guru, among many other roles. He has championed “unabashedly inauthentic” American Chinese cooking, while emphasizing authentic regionalism and fresh, greenmarket ingredients. He has consulted for casinos, governments, real estate developers and restaurant businesses from Miami to Hong Kong. Closer to his roots, Schoenfeld makes a mean matzo ball soup (lauded by Jewish cooking authority Joan Nathan on her series shown on the Public Broadcasting Service, “Jewish Cooking in America”) and is proud of his self-described role as a “consigliere” for Mark Federman of Russ and Daughters deli.
