Wenwen

Two days in the marinade

The chicken rests for two days before the fryer. At Wenwen in New York City, Eric Sze, chef and co-founder, built that patience into a room meant to feel closer to a Taiwanese dinner party than a dining-room performance. Born in Taipei, trained at New York University, and shaped by work that moved through Manhattan and Brooklyn, Sze carries the thread from 886 into this larger Greenpoint kitchen without making it a replica. Wenwen opened in 2022, after 886 had given him a place to sharpen dishes like beef noodle soup and the fried chicken that now anchors the table here.

The name comes from Wenchi, his mother, and Wenhui, his wife. That is the useful key to the place: the cooking has the scale of a restaurant kitchen, but the emotional register of food made for people who are expected to stay awhile. Sze’s Taiwanese comfort food is not nostalgic in the soft-focus sense. It is louder at the edges, with fermented tofu, soy milk, curry, onion powder, black sugar, yuzu, MSG, white pepper, and sweet potato starch doing the work that adjectives often try to do.

Broth, starch, heat, and Taiwan dust

The kitchen’s method is built around seasoning that lands in layers. For the BDSM Fried Chicken, Wenwen uses a young yellow fat chicken from Flushing Live Poultry, marinates it for two days in red fermented tofu, soy milk, curry, and onion powders, then batters it with sweet potato starch and tofu before frying. The point is not only crispness. The hand is in the sequence: cure, debone, coat, fry, cut, send while the crust still answers the knife.

The beef noodle soup works by a different clock. Wenwen’s broth is cooked for 16 hours with oxtail and grass-fed beef, then served with braised beef, noodles, and orangey tallow that the diner folds through at the bowl. Popcorn chicken gets sacha hot honey and Taiwan dust, a mix of white pepper, sugar, MSG, and salt. Fried tangyuan moves the same way, taking glutinous rice balls into a tempura-like shell with peanut butter powder, condensed milk, vanilla ice cream, and black sesame inside. The menu is à la carte, built for small plates and larger shared dishes, but the station logic is clear: the bench favors texture, heat, and the sweet-salt pull of Taiwanese night-market cooking.

A Greenpoint room with room to talk

The room keeps the energy near the table. Wenwen is playful without asking the food to act as décor: blonde wood, readable light, real chairs, a conversational room, and the kind of whim that can put a disco ball in the bathroom while the pass keeps moving. The restaurant sits in north Greenpoint, away from Manhattan’s denser restaurant corridors, and the room benefits from that distance. Groups can order heavily and still hear each other.

The basement space, called The Alley, draws on Taipei back alleys rather than a polished postcard of Taiwan. Upstairs, the craft is easier to see in the rhythm of the plates: popcorn chicken landing hot, lettuce cups cooling the hand, pork belly and cuttlefish holding to their sticky soy, noodles taking on tallow. If Wenwen has a next move to announce, the house keeps it close. For now, the clearest signal remains the sound of the crust breaking on BDSM Fried Chicken.