RedFarm, in the West Village, Turns Up the Flavors

It won’t be easy. They have plaintive black sesame-seed eyes, the dumplings at RedFarm, giving them the appearance of strange, adorable characters in a Miyazaki film. These flat-bellied duck and crab dumplings look like a school of wide-mouthed catfish; the pale-green ones, filled with shrimp and snow-pea leaves, like moon-faced tadpoles. Over here are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, spectral shrimp dumplings in blue, pink, yellow and white, chasing a Pac-Man made of sweet potato tempura with a blueberry for an eye.

Ignore their plaintive stares, and stare at them instead. Look how rounded they are, how their fillings weigh against their glossy wrappers like the summer juice pressing against the skin of a plum. They look firm, ripe, ready. You can tell that they’re going to be good.

But you don’t know how good they really are, and how good RedFarm can be, until you try one. And then, plaintive stares or no, you begin devouring these bundles of delight one by one.

RedFarm, in the West Village, is a collaboration between one of New York’s greatest Chinese chefs, Joe Ng, and one of its greatest Chinese restaurateurs, Ed Schoenfeld. Only one, Mr. Ng, is Chinese by birth. Mr. Schoenfeld is Chinese by calling, a Brooklyn-born Jew who long ago heard an inner voice urging him to bring better kung pao chicken to the people of Manhattan.

They have several clever ideas at RedFarm. First, the menu has been tailored for a Western palate, with none of the bland and slippery specialties that non-Chinese eaters find so enigmatic. It also seems designed for the age of Yelp, when the entire world can be split into either Nothing Special or OMG. RedFarm’s cooking runs hard toward OMG.

Finally, there is the idea the management likes to broadcast: “Chinese cuisine with a Greenmarket sensibility,” which boils down to spending more on ingredients than many other Chinese restaurants do. A server one night rattled off the provenance of just about every scrap in the kitchen, from the rib steak (Creekstone Farms) to the truffles (a forager in France). “We don’t say all this on the menu, but everything is intelligently sourced,” he said.

All that sourcing and intelligence result in some wonderful flavor. The rib steak, marinated for a night in shredded papaya, ginger and soy sauce, is the last thing I’d expected to find in a Chinese restaurant: a great steak. A few more pieces of beef like this around town, and soon baked potatoes and cheesecake will be the only reasons for steakhouses to continue to exist.

The winter farmers’ market can’t be much help in assembling the okra and eggplant in a Thai-style yellow curry, but Mr. Ng must have other connections, because the vegetables can hold their own against the spicy and warming curry, fragrant with lemon grass and rich with coconut cream. The bowl satisfies you and makes you want more at the same time, a tension that feels so good that a meal at RedFarm could begin and end right there.

Could, but shouldn’t. It would be insane to come to RedFarm without having a dumpling, and silly not to have four or five. They are the foundation of Mr. Ng’s fame as the Balanchine of dim sum, built at World Tong in Brooklyn and then at Chinatown Brasserie in NoHo, where he is still the chef.

The shrimp and snow-pea leaf versions have a juicy sweetness far more intense than what you usually find in Chinatown. The mixed-vegetable, with sunny corn kernels peeking through the crimps in the dough, have a right-off-the-vine vibrancy.

Still, neither one is going to overtake Mr. Ng’s soup dumplings in popularity. Here’s how to eat them: hold one in a spoon, raise it to your lips, nip off the puckered crown, suck out the hot thick broth, and try to remember tasting a more-flavorful soup dumpling in Manhattan since the early days of Joe’s Shanghai.