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World-Class Wontons Arrive in Manhattan
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
The wontons that Maxi Lau-O’Keefe’s serves at Maxi’s Noodle are huge in every way: They are several times bigger than the typical bite-size Hong Kong wonton. They are packed with more shrimp than pork, giving them a heavy luxury quotient. They arrive bobbing in a steaming pork-and-fish broth that anyone can, and should, order supplemented with duck-egg noodles. And they’ve got a large devoted following of fans like Chinese-cooking authority Grace Young, who once called these wontons her “all-time favorite.”
Getting them, until now, has required a trip to one of Lau-O’Keefe’s two Queens restaurants. In 2019, she launched Maxi’s as a pop-up out of her aunt’s restaurant, Kissena Cafe. Reviews were glowing and by the end of the year, she’d opened an actual shop in Flushing, taking out a home-equity loan to secure the financing. “I wasn’t thinking,” she says, but the timing was great … until, a few months later, when it wasn’t. The shop made it through the pandemic, however, and now it’s thriving. She opened her second shop nearby, and both are close enough to the Nassau County border to draw a weekend crowd from the Long Island suburbs where Lau-O’Keefe grew up.
Flushing had always been Chinatown for her family, but if they wanted Cantonese food, or to celebrate at a dim sum restaurant, they would go to Manhattan, and throughout her expansion, Lau-O’Keefe has always wanted to open something there — but had trouble locking down a location.
She and her dad scouted slow restaurants, asking on visits whether anyone wanted to sell their lease. The operators of a space at 68 Mott Street called Tipsy Shanghai did. And next week, Lau-O’Keefe will open it as Maxi’s Noodle 3. It’s narrow and has room for just about 30 seats. It won’t look much different from the original Maxi’s, with the same black, red, and gray color scheme, and the menu will be more or less the same but for two notable additions: a plant-based broth and mushroom topping. The new items are a concession to the vegetarians who couldn’t eat anything on Lau-O’Keefe’s all-meat menu. “I was getting a lot of shit about that,” she says.
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