“ I think we made the most of the space,” says Annie Shi, glancing around Lei, her 700-square-foot wine bar in New York’s Chinatown. “It’s intimate, which I think New Yorkers love.”

Lei landed on Doyers Street, a short curved pedestrian-only street rich with history, after a two-year search that took Shi all over downtown. But the opening is the culmination of many more years, stretching back to Shi’s start in the hospitality space. 

“ When I was still working in finance, I was taking a restaurant operations course at NYU, and the reason was to open something with Chinese food and wine,” says Shi, who’s also the co-owner and beverage director of popular restaurants King and Jupiter. “The wine piece kind of evolved over time as well. The more time I spent at King and Jupiter, the more I fell in love with wine. That’s when [the idea] transitioned into a wine bar with Chinese food.”

Aiming to take the concept of wine pairing “to the next level,” Lei is rooted in the idea that outside of tasting menus, diners gravitate toward good-tasting wine that can accompany an entire meal. The list features bottles from well-recognized wine regions like Burgundy and Champagne alongside emerging winemakers from Spain and Greece, as well as a selection of Chinese wines. A friend of Shi’s recently launched an import business, and many of the wines at Lei are being offered Stateside for the first time. 

“What’s cool about China is that they’re still figuring it out — they’re still understanding what varieties work best with the terroir that they have,” says Shi. “There’s no recent history or experience to draw upon. And then there are some really fun experimental things happening with crossing cultures.” Offerings include a sparkling “black muscat meets jasmine tea” wine, and a peach cider made with water honey peaches and Champagne with dosage from rice wine, produced by renowned winemaker Emma Gao of Silver Heights winery in northeastern China. 

The restaurant is named for Shi’s late sister Hannah Lei Shi, who died in the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami. The homage to family and memory runs throughout Lei, embedded in the direction of the food menu to the subtle illustrated mural stretching across one wall. 

The cuisine was conceptualized in collaboration with chef Patty Lee, formerly of Mission Chinese, who Shi connected with via Danny Bowen. The focus at Lei is regional Chinese cuisine, with an emphasis on traditional dishes that speak to a sense of heritage.

“Some of the dishes that are a little bit more reminiscent of home cooking, [Lee] shares that taste memory, and so it’s really easy to talk through those ideas with her,” says Shi. “She completely understood the brief.” Dishes, which veer towards smaller format options, include shao bing flatbread, cockles with loofah gourd, and three-cup squid. 

For the room’s design, she enlisted childhood friend Rachel Jones, an SF-based architectural designer. “ It’s a small room, but I think it feels a little bit bigger than it is because it’s well-proportioned and very functional,” says Shi. Design details include cherry-tone mahogany wood tables and chairs, accent chairs that feature rush weaving, green tiling on the standing bar, pendant lighting and domed wall sconces that add up to create a glowy effect at night. Past the kitchen, the bathroom features a playful custom wallpaper designed by Dominique Fung.

One wall in the dining room features a subtle mural that was based on 16th century lithographic prints of a popular Chinese folk tale, “Journey to the West.” Shi’s father, a voice actor, dubbed a version of the story when she was younger, and Shi grew up in New York listening to the cassette tapes of his narration. She enlisted him to help select the six scenes depicted on the wall.

 Her parents had yet to see the space in its final form. “It really feels surreal when you’ve been thinking and imagining a project and dreaming of a project, just seeing it in the flesh,” says Shi, taking in Lei the week before its public opening. “It’s very surreal. But wonderful.”