The Slack channel lit up early last week with a message from a colleague alerting me to a new restaurant opening.
Ox2 Buns and Noodles. (Ox is pronounced like the animal followed by the number 2.)
“Soft opening,” the restaurant’s banner said in the Slack post. The windows were covered in pictures of soup dumplings and brothy bowls of noodles.
Then a few days later, an email from a reader, Sherri DeRose, said, “My husband and I are in heaven.” Ox2 again. “The closest to NY Chinese food we have found in 10 years.”
At this point, I was close to cartoon-style running to my car and peeling out of the parking lot to get to this restaurant as quickly as possible. Instead I put it on my calendar and waited as patiently as anyone under the FOMO-inducing culture of the internet can withstand. If you eat at a restaurant after it’s already been gaining attention, did you even eat there?