NYU area follows Columbia with Chinese courses

New York college kids have tasty new options thanks to some Yale grads who missed northern Chinese fare.

Junzi Kitchen, a quick-service Chinese food eatery that launched at Yale University in 2015, opened its first Big Apple branch in Morningside Heights near Columbia University last June.

It is now slated to sprout its second Manhattan branch, on Bleecker Street near New York University, this spring.

The 1,700-square- foot location will have 35 seats.

Co-founders Long Zhao, Wanting Zhang, and Ming Bar, who missed the flavors of home in northern China while studying at Yale. Following a fellowship at Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, they launched Junzi Kitchen.

The NYU-area location, designed by Xuhui Zhang, formerly of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, will feature a latenight “lunch” menu of small plates.

Cibo e Vino, the popular Upper West Side northern Italian eatery at 2418 Broadway at 89th Street, has expanded to encompass the space next door, a former laundromat, affording space for a new bar area with a dark butcher block wood bar and an additional 20 seats — and 10 more seats in the main dining room where the old bar used to be. It now has 48 seats plus 22 at the bar.

Cibo e Vino will now have a new fall menu and a late-night bar menu.

The fourth annual Dine Out For Heroes will take place on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. Participating restaurants will pledge $1 per guest — with the funds going to the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which support programs for American vets.

DOFH, an extension of the 11-year old Stand Up For Heroes, has a culinary council that includes SUFH founders Caroline Hirsch and Andrew Fox, and restaurateurs Peter and Penny Glazier.

“Peter and I were so impressed with [SUFH], and everything Caroline Hirsch, Andrew Fox, and Lee and Bob Woodruff have done, we thought it was time to get the culinary community more involved,” Penny Glazier told Side Dish.