A River of Fish Sauce

Ha's Snack Bar earned raves for its forceful Vietnamese cooking. Its follow-up, Bistrot Ha, pushes even harder.

- BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

IF THERE'S ONE thing worse than too much of a good thing, it's too little of it. That was the knock on Ha's Snack Bar, which opened last year to such instantaneous acclaim that word spread the proprietors were immediately looking for a larger second location. The Snack Bar was great, but with two dozen seats, most of them not especially comfortable at that, it could be a treat on the palate and a pain in the ass. Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns's dishes—a turbocharged take on Franco-Vietnamese cooking with escargots in tamarind butter and flaky pockets of vermicelli-studded pâté chaud—were among the most delicious things I ate last year, but when I was rounding up the city's best restaurants this winter, I left Ha's off the list because it seemed like malpractice to send readers somewhere that's so hard to get into.

The promised followup is here, and the crowds have again descended on Bistrot Ha—with the terminal t, as the French would have it. Less than 300 feet from its predecessor, Bistrot Ha is a more fully-fledged restaurant with a proper dining room (45 seats to the Snack Bar's 24) and a proper kitchen (to the Snack Bar's induction burner). Ha now has a real oven in which to bake an evening's worth of beef Wellingtons and a fryer for the frites, which any bistrot worth its t must serve with the steak.