Emmeline Zhao

West Village, Manhattan

Emmeline Zhao is a woman of many talents. Not only is she a Managing Partner and Sommelier at Silver Apricot, but Zhao also fills her time directing documentaries. With her newest restaurant from the Silver Apricot team, Figure 8, opening on top of all of that, we were thrilled to grab some time with her. Silver Apricot is the perfect West Village haunt. It features a cozy dining room with an even cozier kitchen that is turning out food that is colorful and delicious. When you go, each person at the table will need an order of scallion puffs with scallion butter.

Full name, age, where are you from?

Emmeline Zhao, 34. I grew up mostly in North Carolina, but spent about five years, collectively, of my childhood in Shanghai.
What is your title and where do you work?

Managing Partner & Sommelier, Silver Apricot, Figure Eight (forthcoming).

Was food a big part of your upbringing?

Massively so. My parents came to the States as students pursuing their higher degrees in the 1980s. And like many other immigrants, the first thing that figuratively and literally gave them a taste of the home they knew best was the food that they ate. But the ingredients that they grew up with didn’t exist here at the time, so they put a lot of energy into learning about what was available here and figuring out how to utilize it in the culinary ways with which they were raised.

So there were a lot of Chinese noodle dishes made with spaghetti, stir-frys with collard greens, and Chinese braises with ham hocks, just as a few examples. My parents were also used to shopping at wet markets rather than grocery stores, so we always made large hauls from the weekend farmers’ market. We later found out that there was a large Asian supermarket in the town 45 minutes away from our house, so my mom would plan our weeks around the big weekend shopping trip out there.

I also spent a lot of time in Shanghai — where my family is from — both for school and for summers. Anyone who’s been to China knows that life revolves around food there, and in particular, the Shanghainese’s pride for having the best “xiao chi,” or snacks/“little eats,” can cause some pretty raucous arguments with those who hail from other places in the country. I love my snacks.

What are your earliest memories of dining out?

Buffets! We didn’t have a lot growing up, but my parents did the best with what they had, and the luxury of dining out even had to have a value proposition. In the town next to ours in North Carolina, there was an American Chinese buffet called Panda Inn, in a nondescript strip mall off the highway adjacent to a TJ Maxx. A meal there cost in the single digits per person, and it was a great way to feed growing kids. It was the go-to spot for when my parents were exhausted or weren’t able to cook on any given evening, and it was Chinese-adjacent enough for my parents to palate. Sticky sesame chicken and beef with broccoli still courses through my veins. And there’s absolutely nothing like a melting bowl of soft serve scooped up with fortune cookies. We went to Golden Corral as the alternative “treat,” because it was a little more expensive, and it served what my mom considered the golden standard for American fare that she wasn’t able to cook “authentically” at home.

If you could give a piece of advice to someone who wanted to pursue your career, what would it be?

Be and stay hungry to learn — ask questions, think critically, and learn at least something thing that’s not specific to restaurants. In this industry, we talk a lot about humility vs. pride, intent vs. carelessness, status quo vs. disruption, but at the end of the day if you maintain a growth mindset, and position yourself as a lifelong learner, all of those pieces will all fall into place as they should. There’s no manual for how to be successful in this industry — if there were, we wouldn’t be having the conversations we are about supports and innovations needed to make it sustainable. We wouldn’t have armies of tech and finance professionals parachuting in with their “solutions” capes to be the superhero saviors of the restaurant industry. The only way that we can propel ourselves forward, and keep pace with this rapidly evolving world, is to keep an eye on the big picture while learning from each other best practices for how to work within that framework and towards a greater goal, whatever that may be for you.

One of the big ugly truths about this industry is that it’s capricious, and there is often consternation that you “can’t get out” and that things don’t get better. That can unfortunately be very real — when you start young or green in restaurants, you’re often taught things a certain way, and that those things stay that way. And while you tend to be given a lot of depth of professional development, you’re rarely offered much breadth. So being deliberate about seeking out opportunities to learn something that isn’t specific to your job description can be a really important first step in creating professional optionality for yourself later down the line, whether that’s upward growth in the work you’re doing now, or lateral growth into doing something else that you eventually develop interest in.
What do you think working in this industry has taught you?
Empathy. This industry is so diverse in so many ways, and I do think it’s a bit unique in that few other types of workplaces are filled with colleagues that come from all walks of life, concluded their school experience at nearly every level in existence, speak a variety of native languages, and also represent such a broad spectrum of socioeconomic classes. How can you get this mosaic of humans to not only work well together, but care for each other in some way, and also be integral to furthering a common mission? And the best way I’ve found to do that is to put aside all of my preconceived notions, and everything that I know about the professional world, and just learn to understand them all as people. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still not perfect at this, but really learning to empathize with people who are so different from you, whose experiences you can sometimes barely fathom, is so critical to personal and professional growth in this space. 

And that’s all to say that having empathy doesn’t just mean that you have to be on the same wavelength as someone else. It just means that you have to have the sensitivity and EQ that other people’s feelings and situations are just as valid as yours. And being generous with your emotional support and time costs you nothing out-of-pocket for that magnanimity. Reductively, we’re serving food and pouring drinks, we’re not performing open-heart surgery. There’s nothing so exigent in our work that we can’t take care of our people first. This industry is about the people, and you have to learn and understand those people to be able to even start thinking about other decisions and solutions. And I stand firmly in the camp of, “What goes around comes around.”

What's your favorite dish/drink on the menu?

I carry a forever love for our Crispy Bits Fried Rice. We take a big scoop of seasoned steamed rice and put it in a hot pan so that about half of it gets really crispy, and then break it up a bit such that every bite is the perfect scoop of crunchy and chewy. The components in it will change seasonally, right now it’s a sweet and savory Chinese sausage and garlic. But I’m a huge crunchy things person. Remember when I said I love snacks? I like it when my real food is basically like a critical mass of snacks. My family hated eating Bo Zai Fan (Cantonese clay pot rice) with me when I was younger because I hogged all the crispy bits on the bottom. 

What is your favorite place to go out and eat at and what are you ordering?

I’m a creature of habit, and I don’t like to travel far to eat — I’m just not patient enough. So the two places I find myself at all the time are the bar at Marea, because it’s near my house, and the bar at The Noortwyck, because it’s around the corner from Silver Apricot. At both, there’s pretty much nothing you shouldn’t have on the menu. But at The Noortwyck, my move is typically a Seeded Parker House (or two) and the duck breast or roast chicken with anything off the cocktail list. At Marea, I like to get appetizer-sized portions of their pasta entrees so I have an excuse to have three pastas to myself. But it’s a rare occasion that I leave without having the Scampi on Scampi, which is a langoustine tartare quenelle on top of a rectangular piece of fried risotto, and the spaghetti, which is a salinic and spicy load of clams, calamari, and peperoncino. I’ll typically start with a Jalisco Flyer — a spicy tequila cocktail — and find my way to an Amaro by the end of the night. But while all that is delicious, the real reason I go back time and time again, is because the Marea bartenders there are the life of the party, they treat you like you’re one of them, and they make sure your glass is never empty.

You’re on a desert island, what are the 5 kitchen items you need to run your business? 

Oh man. Does a desert island really need an American-Chinese small plates concept with an extensive domestic wine list? I think if I happened to find myself there, I’d make sure I had a towel, sunscreen, a bathing suit, sunglasses, and a wine key with which I’d crack rosé. Because if I just wake up on a desert island, it’s absolutely an indication from the universe that it’s time for me to take vacation.