![]() “My biggest fear is if I treated my staff wrong,” Kang says. This risky strategy has had fantastic payoff, keeping turnover low. When she hires people, Kang prizes personality over experience, even if that means training novices from scratch. And when she had the idea to open MáLà in late 2014, she wanted to create an environment that was nurturing. It just wasn’t her style, something she realized as she spent the next few years working her way through Bar Boulud as a line cook, a manager at Yiming Wang’s Cafe China and China Blue, and a bartender at TriBeCa’s Japanese speakeasy B-Flat. ![]() You have to be able to yell, yes chef! really loudly.” “Sometimes you have to put on this shield to protect yourself and fight back. “Coming from the CIA, I saw how tough it is,” she says. She arrived in New York from Beijing in 2010 to attend the Culinary Institute of America. Kang, who employs 60 people across the three restaurants, realized that emotional exposure functions as its own kind of strength in the kitchen. “I’ve cried in front of my staff plenty of times.” She doesn’t care about acting “tough,” and has no desire to adopt qualities that usually get coded as masculine, like aggression bordering on hostility. There’s value in leaders being vulnerable, she says. Through all this growth, a big thing that Kang thinks about is the environment she’s creating. And by next year, she hopes to open three more Tomorrow locations and another for MáLà. In February of this year, she opened a second MáLà location in Bryant Park. The success has led to a mini-empire: Kang, 26, followed MáLà Project in November 2017 with Tomorrow, a fast-casual joint in the Financial District, where the offerings more closely resemble the dishes she grew up eating in the Chinese cities of Tangshan and Beijing, like stir-fried tomato and scrambled eggs. It was a hit, and soon, other ambitious young people followed with their own businesses, saying that Kang was “the first to have a real dining atmosphere” among Chinese food restaurateurs in the neighborhood. But the aesthetic of the restaurant is all modern East Village. Opened in December 2016 in the East Village, MáLà Project is a Sichuan dry pot restaurant with ingredients more commonly found in Chinatown or Flushing, like chicken gizzards and quail eggs. Now, there are more than a dozen - and many of those restaurateurs credit one restaurant as an influence: MáLà Project, from first-time restaurateur Amelie Kang. ![]() Just two years ago, few Chinese restaurants with downtown NYC aesthetic existed in East Village.
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