i. Biography
In New York City, Chef Joe Ng works the pliant language of dim sum at RedFarm, where sweet potato, shrimp, watercress, mushroom, Chinese barbecue, butter, olive oil, and seasonal local produce can share the same table. Born in Hong Kong and carrying memories of Thanksgivings around Chinese barbecue in an outdoor garden in San Diego, he cooks Chinese food through place, season, and touch rather than through a single regional border.
The Estate
RedFarm in New York City is the main ground of Ng’s work: modern and inventive Chinese cuisine with a greenmarket sensibility, including super-charged dim sum and locally sourced seasonal ingredients. The point is not purity for its own sake, but a locavore approach to reimagining Chinese cuisine through ingredients close at hand. Before this chapter, he was chef at Chinatown Brasserie until 2011. That earlier role sits naturally beside the specialty that defines him most clearly: dim sum, a form built from dough, steam, filling, fold, and timing. The biography begins farther away. Hong Kong is his birthplace, while San Diego enters through a family memory of Thanksgiving meals shaped by Chinese barbecue cooked in an outdoor garden. Those two coordinates help explain a cookery that can hold migration, holiday, smoke, and Cantonese technique without treating any of them as decoration. In 2018, the James Beard Foundation named him a Restaurant and Chef Awards semifinalist for Best Chefs in NYC for his work at the restaurant. The honor attached a national restaurant-awards context to cooking that is often read first through dumplings, roast meats, and the compact engineering of small plates.
In the Cellar
The cooking does not stay inside one Chinese region. On the menu, Sichuan appetizers can sit near Hong Kong dim sum, Cantonese barbecue, Korean rice cakes, Italian pasta, butter, and olive oil where they make sense. That range is not a blur; it is a method. A dumpling wrapper has to be thin enough to yield but strong enough to hold. A seasonal ingredient has to earn its place in a Chinese dish rather than arrive as a label. Butter and olive oil are used when they fit the structure of the food, not as a gesture toward fusion. What gives the work its grain is the combination of local sourcing and Chinese technique. Greenmarket produce moves through familiar forms—dumplings, barbecue, appetizers—while the forms themselves remain legible. The result is Chinese cooking that registers weather, market stalls, and the changing texture of a New York season.
The Bottlings
The best-known RedFarm signature is the Pac Man dumpling plate: a sweet-potato round cut to resemble Pac-Man, with shrimp dumplings standing in as multicolored ghosts. It is playful, but the mechanics are serious—shape, color, wrapper, filling, and the visual timing of a dish that has to read before it is eaten. At Decoy, Peking duck is described as Ng’s signature dish. That item places another craft beside dim sum: lacquered skin, carving, heat, and the discipline of a dish whose pleasure depends on exact handling. In 2014, during the New York Culinary Experience, Chef Joe Ng of RedFarm prepared Chicken, Mushroom & Watercress Shu Mai Dumplings for his Dumplings Demystified class. The dish title alone shows his working vocabulary: poultry, fungi, greens, and a classic dumpling form brought into a teaching setting. Taken together, the signatures show a chef who treats Chinese cuisine as material in motion. His food can be comic in appearance, rooted in barbecue memory, local in its sourcing, and still exacting about the old demands of dim sum: proportion, texture, steam, and the small decisive gesture of the hand.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Joe
Where does Joe Ng work?
Joe Ng is Chef at RedFarm in New York City.
What style or method defines Joe Ng's work?
His work uses a locavore approach to modern, inventive Chinese cuisine, with a greenmarket sensibility and locally sourced seasonal ingredients.
What are Joe Ng's signature releases or dishes?
Pac Man dumplings are a RedFarm signature item, and Peking duck is described as his signature dish at Decoy.
