I still remember this scene so vividly: I’m 12 years old at my mom’s friend’s son’s wedding banquet in New York Chinatown’s premier restaurant. Aunties are sipping red wine with a splash of Coke and fussing over how much I’ve grown. I’m about to have the most epic 10-course Cantonese dinner, complete with hap tou ha (walnut shrimp), jing lou yu (steamed sea bass), and siu yuk (suckling pig). But there’s one dish that really stands out in my mind from this feast, a food that I rarely see in my adult life: a heaping platter of jellyfish salad. With my chopsticks, I snag a few strands of jellyfish and shovel them into my mouth. It’s crunchy. Chewy. Tangy. Sweet. Life is good.
While a few quintessential Cantonese banquet dishes like honey walnut shrimp have made their way onto more menus in the past two decades, the humble jellyfish salad remains a dish not often found outside formal banquet halls. But at Potluck Club, a Cantonese American restaurant located in New York City’s Chinatown, I recently reencountered this childhood favorite. At the restaurant, which opened in 2022, executive chef Zhan Chen works with his brother and sous chef, Peter Chen, to add their own twists to dishes, like jellyfish salad, inspired by foods they grew up eating.
As Chinese cuisines from regions like Sichuan and Hunan gain popularity in the US, Potluck Club aims to offer a uniquely Cantonese American experience. It joins a wave of other restaurants with a similar aim of expanding the reach and interpretation of Cantonese American cooking, like Bonnie’s in Brooklyn and Needle in Los Angeles. “I don't think there's enough representation nowadays for our Cantonese food,” Zhan says. “Potluck Club is a love letter to the food I ate growing up.”
Here the jellyfish salad I remember from childhood takes a new form, preserving the nostalgia that many of us have for the food we grew up with, while bringing Cantonese American cooking to wider audiences.
The delightfully textural jellyfish is a delicacy across Asia in countries like Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and China. And on tables in America, for many Cantonese Americans, it’s a taste of celebration and joy. Jellyfish is typically served as one of the first courses at Chinese banquets for special occasions like Lunar New Year, weddings, or birthdays. Cut into squiggly tendrils—not unlike strands of noodle—the jellyfish is traditionally tossed in a simple vinaigrette of soy sauce and rice vinegar. At Potluck Club, it’s instead prepared as a tiger salad, a side dish popular in northern China made with scallion, cilantro, and Chinese celery. The result is crisp and refreshing, an excellent canvas for a chili-soy-garlic vinaigrette.
To make the salad, Zhan starts by soaking the jellyfish in water to remove salt added by fishmongers as a preservative. To make the salad’s garnish, he tosses scallion, cilantro, and Chinese celery in rice vinegar and sesame oil. For the vinaigrette, pickled Fresno chilis and garlic—inspired by the Vietnamese food that Zhan often ate as a kid—are combined with sugar and soy sauce. Before the dish is served, it's finished with a dash of fresh rice vinegar and sesame oil. It’s not like the one I grew up eating, but it is distinctly Cantonese American in its blend of flavors.
Zhan introduced the jellyfish salad as a key part of Potluck Club’s opening menu, a way to highlight the fusion of flavors that shaped his personal vision of Cantonese American cooking. “It's one of my favorite dishes on the menu,” Zhan says. “People who don't normally eat it try it, and end up really enjoying it.”
The rest of the restaurant plays into Cantonese American nostalgia, too. The menu includes dishes like salt and pepper chicken served with scallion biscuits, pickled jalapeno, and chili-plum jam, and a pineapple soft serve with bolo bao crumble—inspired by pineapple buns, a familiar pastry found in Hong Kong-style bakeries. And the decor is an homage to Hong Kong pop culture. The walls are lined with Stephen Chow movie posters and trinkets one might find in their grandmother’s house—lucky beckoning cats, haw flakes, Baoding balls. Being in the space, I felt like a kid rummaging through the contents of my childhood home. The restaurant feels new and exciting, but I’m reminded of sitting at that banquet over twenty years ago, slurping up strands of jellyfish.
As someone who shares the chef’s experience as a child of Cantonese immigrants, I felt a sense of comfort and understanding when I went to the Potluck Club for the first time. That feeling rings true for Zhan. “I want this restaurant to represent kids of immigrants that grew up in this community.”