Philippe Express: Don’t let the name throw you; the cuisine here is Chinese, not French, and Seth Rogen has no connection with the place. Chef Philippe Chow is all about Chicken Satays, Crispy Beef, and Salt and Pepper Prawns, which has worked well for him uptown on 60th Street. This downtown satellite, opening tonight, features red banquets and automated touch-screen ordering. And in a “Big Brother’s Watching You Eat” twist, the touch screens will remember......

James (pictured), in Prospect Heights, specializes in farm-fresh French-American cuisine. It's said that chef James Calvert once catered a nightmarish photo shoot for the demanding Britney Spears, who dismissed his buffet and demanded BLTs. She then sent those back, insisting upon BLTs sans mayo. Irrevocably scarred, Calvert went on to open what Frank Bruni at the Times describes as "the kind of modest, warm refuge produced by a chef who wants to simplify things, to......

A march from the Brooklyn Bridge through Chinatown to celebrate the Beijing Olympics is exposing a big rift in Manhattan's Chinese immigrant community. Opposed to the celebrations are older Chinese-Americans from Taiwan and Hong Kong who've seen their ranks diminished; on the other side are newer immigrants from the mainland who've poured into Chinatown in recent years. A 74-year-old business consultant tells the Sun,"The mainland government, they're Communists, and we don't like that. The new......

Chai Park and Jin Hee Lee, a law student and a lawyer, were stuck on line at a Manhattan Pinkberry last summer when they spotted the product seen here, an Alessi “Mandarin Citrus Juicer” that the frozen yogurt chain sells at some locations. They found the designer’s characterization of Chinese men as smiling toadies whose heads are great for squeezing juice a tad offensive. Though the Korean owners of Pinkberry insist the juicer has offended......

The Sun’s Paul Adams is the latest critic to get around to Hundred Acres (pictured), the meticulously-sourced, farm-to-table restaurant which used to be Provence. While the Daily News was haunted by the ghosts of the old restaurant, Adams says “the transformation is a delightful blast of fresh air. A sultry Southern accent marks the restaurant's menu… where "seasonal" isn't just a buzzword, but where you actually look forward to returning season after season to see......

Congratulations, America! You're having less sex than almost anyone else! According to the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey, Americans get it on less often than most, with only 53% having regular, weekly action (and with only 44% actually reporting being satisfied with their sex lives). In fact, the average American gets it on only slightly more often than the Japanese who were at the bottom of the list. Greeks preferred to be on top with......

Bronx-born writer Richard Price, famous for his gritty urban novels Clockers and Freedomland, as well screenplays like The Color of Money and award-winning episodes of The Wire, has now turned his eye for detail on the turbo-gentrifying Lower East Side. Lush Life, his first novel in five years, was described by Times critic Michiko Kakutani as “a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City... no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price.” The story concerns......

Anyone who’s ever gotten off the 7 train in Flushing and walked to the Queens Botanical Garden knows that the majority of the area’s Chinese eateries and businesses are clustered around the northern end of Main Street. As you move further south, Indian sari shops, chaat houses and grocery stores start to appear. But lately a handful of Chinese restaurants have elbowed into the southern end; one such newcomer is Oriental Express Food Garden,......

No, he's not blushing from all the attention. Mao Mi is a Red Panda and the newest addition to Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn. He arrived last week from Michigan's Binder Park Zoo as part of a Wildlife Conservation Society breeding project. Red Pandas are an endangered species with fewer than 2,500 adults thought to remain in the wild in Bhutan, China, India, Laos, Nepal and Burma. Mao Mi will probably be mated with this......

Photo credit: sniderscion Torontoist spent its week uncovering who was behind mysterious ads for a drug called "Obay" that popped up across the country (Scientology? Frank Shepard Fairey?), first tracing them to an advocacy group called Colleges Ontario and then confirming their suspicions a few days later.Phillyist learned how to put on a puppet show – it's not as easy as you might think!Shanghaiist discovers that the average starting monthly pay for fresh graduates......

Cartoons just got a little more real with The Three Thug Mice, an online series set in New York City. The 35 animated shorts follow the tales (and tails!) of three rodent crooks named Vic, Tik and Brik. Described as an "ongoing ghetto saga" set in some of the seedier sectors of the concrete jungle, the trio's home turf is light years away from Disney World. (Though that is the Hotel Chelsea in the......

A judge has finally ruled on a long-simmering dispute between a restaurant and its deliverymen. Last March deliverymen at the popular Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Grill, which has locations in Greenwich Village and on the Upper West Side, demanded a raise from owners Simon and Michelle Nget. The deliverymen reasoned that since the chain was pulling in more than $2 million a month, they ought to earn more than $120 for a 75-hour week. They were......

One of the things that makes eating dim sum in New York City exciting is the seeming endless variety of savory and sweet morsels. Even veteran dim sum eaters are rewarded by new discoveries every so often. An initial visit to Chatham Square Restaurant for lunch last Friday yielded just such a find. One of the dessert carts had flaky green pastries that resembled caterpillars. Oddly colored desserts are fairly common in dim sum......

Photos via the Guggenheim Museum. Everyone's bursting with anticipation for the opening of Cai Guo-Qiang's new exhibit at the Guggenheim; the site-specific installation serves as a mid-career retrospective and is now just four short days away from being unveiled. The NY Times has a lengthy profile of the artist (who has lived in New York since 1995) which begins with this insight: "his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of......

On Sunday afternoon, the fourth day of the Lunar Year, the streets and restaurants of Flushing's Chinatown were packed with families celebrating the Year of the Rat. In case you're wondering, that headline – like many of the Chinese people in Flushing – is Mandarin. It translates roughly to "Congratulations and best wishes for a prosperous New Year." Even though it was already 1:30 p.m., the urge for dim sum was all-powerful, so we're......

Lunar New Year, by Harris Graber at flickr This afternoon was the parade celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year; it's the Year of the Rat. Chinatown in Manhattan is one of the earliest concentrations of Chinese people in the United States. After the jump are more early pictures of the parade.......

Maybe you've received a flier to see a show at Radio City Music Hall called Chinese New Year Splendor, which is promoted as a holiday celebration of China’s diverse cultural riches. But mixed within the traditional Mongolian dancing, orchestral music and Buddhist parables are dramatizations of the Chinese government’s oppression of Falun Gong, a qigong-based spiritual practice that is banned in China. And the show’s political content is prompting audiences to walk out by......

It's time for the Lunar New Year, which starts February 7th and lasts for 14 days, and this year is the Year of the Rat, 4706. Sure, there are plenty of things to do to celebrate the holiday, but to us, it means one thing -- a new year banquet. We've found a few places that are offering banquets in honor of the Year of the Rat, including variations of traditional Chinese Lunar New Year......

An animal near and dear to the Gothamist heart has been embroiled in a Super Bowl controversy! This year's wardrobe malfunction is now the debate over an animated ad from SalesGenie.com that features pandas. During the commercials, two pandas discuss how to stay in business while speaking with Chinese (English-as-a-second-language) accents. There is also one panda who speaks in non-accented English. After the growing criticism (even College Humor dubbed it "the first commercial to......

Professor, author and activist Robert Thurman is widely regarded as the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, having been a major force in the widespread introduction of Tibetan culture and religion to the west. In 1962, Thurman became the first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, but after a few years he shifted from strict monasticism to the more conventional lifestyle of an academic. Though currently on sabbatical to write another book, Thurman remains......

A veteran of Nobu and Ruby Foo’s, Chris Cheung was hired 5 months ago to replace Patricia Yeo at Monkey Bar, the red satin and black lacquer midtown institution known primarily for its, well, monkey theme. In an effort to reemphasize the food quotient of the restaurant, the 38 year-old chef maintains an inventory of global tastes and reassembles them using the template of traditional Chinese food: The curly fries, for example, that come with......

SFist worried over drugstore chain Walgreens celebration of Black History Month.Gothamist was surprised that apparently New York City is the fourth most miserable city in the country, after Detroit, Stockton, CA, and Flint, MI.Shanghaiist finds out what the Chinese think of Hilary and Obama.It was with a healthy amount of schadenfreude that Phillyist reported that former Eagle, and now Cowboy (ew), Terrell Owens owes the Eagles a significant wad of cash.Torontoist is two weeks......

This weekend marks the start of many pre-Lunar New Year Festivities in the city. The New Year begins on February 7 (more information here), and there will be the firecracker ceremony and cultural festival in Chatham Square on that day, plus the Lunar New Year Parade and Festival in Chinatown on February 10. There is also a Lunar New Year Parade in Flushing on February 9. Today through Monday, the Museum of Chinese in America......

Rev up your Manolos (or, whatever), Fashion Week starts tomorrow! A little history: "Fashion Week originally began as 'Press Week' when a well-known fashion publicist named Eleanor Lambert organized the event in 1943. During the 1970s and '80s, designers began to show their collections in lofts, restaurants and clubs across New York City. It wasn't until Fern Mallis, vice president of IMG, the company that produces Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, searched for a venue where all......

Gothamist has dined in all kinds of joints in Flushing’s Chinatown – killer Cantonese, top-flight dim sum and lamb-laden Northern Chinese. The area we haven’t explored much is the food courts, mazes of stalls so diverse that Tony Bourdain could easily cull material for an episode or two. It’s not that we are squeamish, it’s just that the signs are all in Chinese and many of the proprietors speak little English. A non-Chinese speaker......

It’s rare when a book causes the sudden desire to collect large quantities of AP flour, unsalted butter and sugar, but that’s what Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey might do to you. Other traditional bake-books operate within the wholly confined orbit of strudel and streusels; A Baker’s Odyssey has strudels galore but is also about forgotten or esoteric American immigrant recipes, so it also covers kulich and chin chin cookies, shoofly pie and puran poori.......

After posthumously leaving $12 million to her dog, Leona Helmsley is ready to spread the wealth with humans through her own charitable trust (created in 1999). Yesterday Christie's announced they would be auctioning off paintings, sculptures, furniture and other property from the late real estate mogul's numerous homes. Spokesman Rik Pike stated that each auction will take place this year, and "the collection reflects a sophisticated taste and a wonderful sense of style across a......

In June of 2007, Mark Malkoff made news with his attempt, documented in a funny video, to patronize each of Manhattan’s 171 Starbucks in a single day. Now the Comedy Central staffer is back in the press with his latest quirky idea; he spent last week living in the Paramus, New Jersey IKEA to avoid his fumigated apartment. The strange experiment has been humorously documented on his website; we got him on the phone in......

The Brooklyn Paper isn't the only one who has missed Woody Allen's "quirky, oh-so-New-York films." On the verge of releasing his latest movie, Cassandra's Dream (in theaters Friday), Allen talked to The Daily News about when he might bring his New York to celluloid again. Looking back at his original love letter to New York, we find out that at first he didn't like his 1979 movie Manhattan, thinking "If I can't do better than......

Crunchy, salty, spicy, and satisfying, these quick pickled cucumbers add a nice kick to most any meal. We reduced the oil content from Kuo's original recipe to make it a bit lighter and healthier, and rinsed off the excess salt after maceration in order to obtain a more balanced flavor, at least to our palate. Quick-Pickled Cucumbers with Chili Bean Sauce (adapted from The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo) For the quick-pickling: 2......