Created in partnership with Toyota
Cory Ng didn’t move to Chinatown to open a restaurant. He grew up there. His parents poured everything they had into that neighborhood. When he and his friends decided to open Potluck Club in June 2022, they weren’t making a calculated real estate play—they were staying put in the only neighborhood that ever felt like theirs.
On paper, Potluck Club is a modern Cantonese-American restaurant. The build-out looks like nothing else on the block, the food leans into classics without being reverent about them, and the energy inside feels less like a restaurant and more like a long dinner with people who actually like each other—because most of them do. Ng and his partners have known each other for over fifteen years. That’s not a staff, that’s a crew. “We’re planting our flag deeper into the ground in Chinatown,” Ng says. “We’re taking a stance. We’re representing who we are and bringing it into the future.”
He means that literally. Every morning after dropping his son at school, Ng hits the produce warehouses on Allen Street—an operation that’s been running for 40 years, family-owned, stacked floor to ceiling, indifferent to trends. He sources from the fruit stands and vegetable shops that most restaurant operators in his position have long since bypassed for something more convenient. He doesn’t look at it as activism. He sees it as the only thing that makes sense: without those businesses, Chinatown loses the ingredients that make Chinatown food what it is. Without them, Potluck Club doesn’t work either.
The neighborhood is changing quickly, and Ng knows it. The old bakeries—the ones where residents sit for two hours over a single coffee, and no one rushes them out—are closing as their owners retire. No one is taking over. The cultural infrastructure that made Chinatown what it is doesn’t have a next generation lined up, and Ng talks about that with the urgency of someone who watched it happen in real time, not someone who read about it.
When Potluck Club got traction, people pushed Ng to expand. Brooklyn. Queens. He said no every time. Phoenix Palace, his second restaurant, opened as a deeper cut into Cantonese banquet food—whole roasted dishes, meals from Chinese weddings and hundred-day celebrations—and it also stayed in Chinatown. Staying wasn’t the safe call. It was the whole point.
That’s what calling your shot looks like for Ng: not a single big swing, but a years-long refusal to leave. He wants the next generation of kids from this neighborhood to feel proud of where they came from—loud about it, even. He’s building that argument one restaurant at a time.
Toyota’s Call Your Shot campaign is about people who commit to something bigger than a safe outcome. For Ng, the neighborhood and the bet are one and the same.
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