When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Ha’s Snack Bar, a tiny, delicious little pocket on Broome Street, is a snack bar. That’s not to diminish the food, which is ambitious, filling, and meal-size, but to fairly assess the space itself, which is ambitious, full, and minuscule. Forty seats might constitute a petite restaurant. Ha’s, with 24, mostly bar and counter, is a restaurant snack.
I share this up front to manage expectations. Since it opened at the tail end of last year, Ha’s has been bursting at the seams. The restaurant takes some reservations, but the method I found reliable was to show up at least half an hour before its 5:30 p.m. opening and line up behind fellow aspirants. You can go to Ha’s now and patiently cool your heels until your turn is called, or you can go to Ha’s in three months, when the hype and fervor will have died down some. Either way, I’d go, because Ha’s, despite the current challenges of admission, is turning out some of the most interesting, tastiest dishes I’ve had this winter.
Ha’s is scrappy in the winning way that more restaurants used to be. Anthony Ha, alongside one cook, runs a kitchen that amounts to little more than a butcher block, in full view of his guests, and makes everything except what his wife, Sadie Mae Burns, prepares: She’s the house baker as well as, with Ha, the wine director, general manager, and part-time reservationist. If Ha’s seems more polished than this description suggests, it’s in part because this couple has experience. After meeting in the kitchen of Mission Chinese Food in 2015, they developed Ha’s Đặc Biệt (Vietnamese for “special”) as a roving pop-up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and, briefly, Paris. During that time, they sold out dinners and built a large following, which has become both blessing and curse. When word reached them that I was planning to review the restaurant, a plea came back: Could you not?
Ha and Burns have made similar requests of other critics around town; they don’t need the press. I hate to join a pile-on, but unfortunately their blood-pudding tart — a smooth, ferric slab of soft sausage on Burns’s rough puff pastry, the plate stained with a few collapsed kumquats — is too good. If you see it, grab it. The menu changes often, and by the time I went back, it had become pâté chaud, the same pastry, but now encasing a vermicelli-enriched pork sausage, a kind of meaty Danish that, Burns told me, Vietnamese kids eat for breakfast. (She told me this at the restaurant; she runs food to the customers as well.)
Ha’s use of Vietnamese ingredients can electrify some otherwise traditional bistro dishes. “Fish sauce is a through-line throughout,” our waiter told us. “Always factor that in.” My “bicoastal” New York- and Saigon-dwelling Vietnamese friend sniffed that Ha goes a little too heavy on his favorite ingredient. “You’re not supposed to taste it as a defining flavor,” my friend told me. “It’s supposed to be salt that’s balanced by citrus, sugar, and spice.”
I definitely tasted the fish sauce, but I tasted plenty besides: the citric tang of tamarind in the sweet scrim of butter that bathes a platter of shelled escargots, rich and syrupy enough that it closes back over the spent cups once you’ve plucked out the snail. Lots of garlic and lots of lime. A crispy rain of dried shrimp over an oeuf mayonnaise, with the warm, fruity heat of a layer of chile inside.
Then there are the flavors that I couldn’t easily identify. Ngo om, rice-paddy herb. Diep cá, the fabulously named “fish mint.” Where did these flavors come from? Scrappiness is seeking out what you need as well as knowing where to find it: The herbs are from Tan Tin Hung, a Vietnamese market on the Bowery where everything is shipped in from Florida each Friday. Tripe, meanwhile, served by the slippery, noodlish bowlful, warmed with cinnamon and star anise, comes via a plug at the neighboring bodega. “They get the best tripe,” Burns said, laughing.
With a deft touch, Ha’s smuggles blood and guts into what might otherwise have been a business-as-usual downtown wine bar. Dionne Warwick and Sade perfume the dining room. The space still maintains much of the aesthetic of its former tenant, Flynn McGarry’s Gem Wine: bare wood and chrome, a few sprigs of plant life here and there, friend-of-the-house light fixtures (cucumber and resin by the artist James Cherry). There are only about six seatbacks in the whole room, so most guests sit on backless stools, some of which face nothing more than a small ledge and a wall. These privations haven’t kept anyone away. People — a lot of them, it seems — are clamoring to get in.
Top Pick
Ha’s Snack
297 Broome St., nr. Forsyth St.; instagram.com/has_dac_biet
Going Big(ger)
If all goes to plan, Ha’s will open a larger space in the near future and turn this into the snack bar it was always intended to be.
A Little Sweet
Among the desserts, I enjoyed a crême caramel with coffee-liqueur granita. But on the subject of booze …
Bottle Service
… You could also just go with a little post-meal nip of vermouth. Burns is an enthusiast and stocks several unusual varieties.
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