On a slow Sunday evening in early August, King Tai eases into service. Soft rock plays through the Crown Heights bar. A stylized landscape mural in seafoam tones winds its way across a bumpout above the bar. Shell-shaped chandeliers cast warm light across the room while fixed chrome stools lend the space an old-school malt shop vibe. Even the bathroom was designed with care: blue-green from floor to ceiling, with a copper dragon mounted on the wall.
Around a square table to the right of the entry, three friends talk smack about work. To their left, a young couple on what appears to be a first date sit ramrod-straight, both med students, as it turned out. A few people nurse drinks at the nine-seat bar. Before long, more locals begin drifting in, grabbing cocktails and something to nibble.
For 11 years, King Tai has been a breezy neighborhood bar built around summer-all-year cocktails and get-togethers. Now, it enters its next chapter, making room for dinner.
From Fish Market to Tiki Cocktails
When Dane Risch, co-founder, general manager, and beverage director, and his business partner, GDT interior designer Palmer Thompson-Moss, opened King Tai in 2015, they wanted a neighborhood place that stayed open late with music, drinks, and a mix of people.
To create that atmosphere, Risch pulled from his years of hospitality experience working in New York restaurants and bars. After moving to the city in 2000, he spent nearly a decade as manager and bartender at Tribeca’s famous Bubby’s Pie Co., and another at Botanica on Houston St., where the owner became a mentor he still calls for advice. Hospitality initially supported his artistic pursuits in classic New York fashion: playing in bands, screenprinting, and graphic design. “Eventually, hospitality became the thing I did as the artistic pursuit,” Risch says. “I’d been in the industry so long, there was almost no other path for me.” Then, moving to Brooklyn, he wanted his own gig closer to home—King Tai.
The name came with the space. Before the bar, the address was home to King Tai, a Chinese-American fish market, serving Crown Heights through the 1970s and ’80s. Risch and Thompson-Moss found an old photograph of its signage and decided to keep the name and honor the building’s past.
In the years since, Risch has watched Crown Heights shift. New residents arrived; Covid knocked some commercial life sideways; longtime businesses held on. King Tai is still standing. “I feel lucky to be joining the club” of small businesses in the neighborhood, he says. “That’s a real rite of passage.”
Babydudes Moves In
Food was never absent from King Tai. It just came and went. Over the years, the bar hosted somewhere between 50 and 75 food pop-ups, from one-night affairs to recurring collaborations. It became a culinary sandbox for chefs testing ideas and building audiences, some eventually opening restaurants of their own. “It was always an incubator for people who had good ideas,” Risch says.
The arrangement made sense for a bar that saw itself as a nightlife operation. Risch didn’t want to run a kitchen on top of everything else, though the dream of having one never went away. After the pandemic and a downtick in the nightlife scene, the idea of regular food service began to feel less indulgent and more practical. “It presented itself as a necessity and the fulfilling of an old dream,” he says.
Enter Hannah Jacobs and Tali Petschek of culinary duo Babydudes. The pair first met at King Tai, where they also crossed paths with Risch, who became a fan and later a regular at their 2019 cafe on Nostrand Avenue, before the chefs moved to California during the pandemic. When Jacobs and Petschek returned to New York this spring, they called him, considering their next move. Risch presented an idea that was less daunting than opening a restaurant from scratch. King Tai had the space, the customers, and an audience that remembered their food. “We married up with kismet timing,” Risch says.
Bar-Friendly Bites
The permanent Babydudes menu, launched in May, doesn’t ask King Tai to suddenly become a restaurant. It leans into bar snacks, with standouts including cheesy saffron arancini bites with vodka sauce ($14), potato wedges with “zippy” fry sauce ($10), salt-and-vinegar popcorn ($5), roasted eggplant dip served with crostinis ($15), and a tuna melt with sun-dried tomato, roasted red pepper, and Swiss ($17). The house-made ice cream provides a rich, grand finale ($10).
Risch sees a shared sensibility. “Babydudes is to food what we are to drinks,” he says. “They do something simple, with care, and it holds its place.”
That philosophy carries into Risch’s “party drinks” (all $15), which keep summer on permanent rotation. Sweet Talk, a customer favorite brought back as a special, mixes curry-infused rum, pineapple, passion fruit, lime, Caribbean “peppa sauce,” and Angostura. Satellite of Love riffs on the tiki classic Saturn with oolong-infused overproof bourbon, passion fruit, orgeat, lime, falernum, and hibiscus tea.
On the horizon is a more obvious food-and-drink marriage: a happy-hour deal matching Babydude’s shrimp cocktail with a martini: ”cocktail-and-cocktail” ($16).
Keeping the Party Going
King Tai is still, fundamentally, a nightlife spot. As the evening wears on, the music gets louder, people arrive alone, meet friends at the bar, and linger over drinks and salty snacks. But the new food program is opening up more possibilities. New chairs and individual tables replaced the old rows of seating, giving diners enough room to wield a fork without feeling like they’re eating at a folding-chair banquet. The kitchen now runs Thursday through Sunday, with Risch eyeing a weekend lunch expansion later this fall. He says it’s time to fill gaps, following a couple of staple brunch spot closings, including Mayfield’s shutdown in May.
“We don’t expect King Tai to go anywhere soon,” Risch says. “The investments we make now will pay off down the road; we just have to make sure we’re on the right path. And with Babydudes on board, we are.”
On September 6, King Tai will return to one of its favorite traditions: an end-of-summer Labor Day cookout starting at 4 pm. This year, three specials will be served alongside the new menu: peach panzanella with cucumber, mint, basil, ricotta salata, and champagne vinaigrette ($14); BLT with basil mayo ($16); and shrimp sliders with charred corn, scallion, pickled onion, and cilantro mayo ($5 each or 4 for $16). The kitchen will be closed the following Monday as normal.
For Risch, parties like this capture the bar at its most authentic: food spilling outside, neighbors and friends packed together, everyone temporarily forgetting everyday difficulties. “It brings out the best of New York,” he says.
King Tai is open Monday through Friday from 5 pm on, and Saturday and Sunday from 4 pm. The kitchen serves from opening to 10 pm Thursday through Sunday.
King Tai
1095 Bergen Street, Crown Heights
@kingtaibar
