An Austrian Restaurant in Ridgewood Goes ‘Vaguely Asian’

A former head chef at Mission Chinese makes her solo debut at an all day cafe in Ridgewood

An Austrian Restaurant in Ridgewood Goes ‘Vaguely Asian’

Kate Telfeyan moved to Bushwick to be closer to her job. At first, that job was the Bushwick debut of Mission Chinese, which she had opened as its head chef in 2018 following a year of working as a line cook at Mission’s since-shuttered location in the Lower East Side. The one in Bushwick closed too, briefly, during the onset of the pandemic, and this was around when her lease ended and she decided to move yet again, but to Ridgewood this time. It was there she befriended Mike Stamatelos, another expatriate who recently moved to the neighborhood after he felt burnt out by his work as a McKinsey consultant. In Ridgewood, he had opened an Austrian restaurant that he named after a Moby song. The restaurant was part of a local developer’s extended project to gentrify the neighborhood and, like the colonial police inspector who tells Franz Fanon that his work made feel like “something was wrong,” Stamatelos began to feel something wrong in the air too. The developer’s latest project had been another vaguely European cafe, located a block away and named, this time, after a dog. He complained about it to his shared landlord and then to a blogger last month for New York’s Grubstreet. Then he decided to open a new restaurant. 

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Top photo credit: Andrew Karpan

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