With two to an order, two orders of these will make a feast. The seitan, coated in hoisin-lingonberry sauce, was complemented perfectly by a large fresh slice of ohshinko, pickled daikon radish. The Happy Bull-da is filled with barbeque pork seitan which, no joke, was a dead ringer for the real thing. Happy Bull-da is a bao, a Chinese steamed bun generally filled, sandwich style, with pork of some sort. My lunch at Buntopia was comprised of three dishes, Happy Bull-da, Mango Tango (they like their cutesy names), and Thai coconut curry chicken ramen, a winter special.
Most impressively, to me at least, is the number of regular customers they’ve garnered already - people who come in once a week or literally “every single day” for their favorite dish. Chen admits that it’s been tough, as one would expect opening a restaurant to be, but that business is “pretty good” and growing. This puts Buntopia, open and doing healthy business on its first birthday, right on track as per national averages. Turns out, though, that common wisdom ain’t so wise - in 2014, economists Tian Luo and Philip B Stark analyzed 20 years of Bureau of Labor Statistics data and found that actual one-year closure rates for restaurants are actually more like 17 percent. NYC’s famously turbulent restaurant scene seems like proof of this. The common wisdom is that upwards of 90 percent of single-location, full-service restaurants close within their first year. I stopped by to see how the food was a year on and to discuss the business of clean eating with owner Sean Chen.
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