Photo: danny4stockphoto (iStock )

Heres a piece of advice for aspiring restaurateurs out there: If you are going to open a restaurant, particularly one that serves a cuisine from a culture that is unfamiliar to you, youd damned well better do your research. Otherwise, you might end up like Arielle Haspel, a white nutritionist who decided to open up Lucky Lees, a clean Chinese restaurant in Manhattan last spring. Lucky Lees is now closed, after just eight months.

Lucky Lees was the center of controversy even before it opened. As Chinese chefs and food writers point out, the word clean implies that other Chinese food is dirty, a stereotype that Chinese restaurants have been fighting for decades. Haspel didnt help her cause by posting messages on Instagram like, We heard youre obsessed with lo mein but rarely eat it. You said it makes you feel bloated and icky the next day? Well, wait until you slurp up our HIGH lo mein. Not too oily. Or salty. Then it was revealed that the restaurant was named after Haspels husband Lee, who is also white, leading to charges of cultural appropriation. The backlash was such that Yelp had to disable Lucky Lees listing.

The New York Times published a lengthy article about the controversy including an interview with Haspel, who explained that clean was a reference to the clean eating movement, which involves consumption of organic foods and olive oil and the avoidance of MSG, and apologized for misrepresenting Chinese food. We were never trying to do something against the Chinese community, she said. We thought we were complementing an incredibly important cuisine, in a way that would cater to people that had certain dietary requirements. The Times also quoted Haspels critics at length, who pointed out that many Chinese restaurants already used organic ingredients and that they didnt feel bloated when they ate Chinese food. A story about the closing by NBC News added that bias against MSG is less about scientifically proven health effects and more about racism.

Lucky Lees was one of a group of lucky Chinese restaurants founded by white people, including Andrew Zimmerns Lucky Cricket outside Minneapolis and Gordon Ramsays Lucky Cat in London.

Both of those, however, remain open.

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Lucky Lees, the clean and tone-deaf NYC Chinese restaurant, closes - The Takeout