For KARAOKE IN CHINATOWN

DR. CLARK 104 Bayard St.; drclarkhouse.com

WHEN JAPANESE RESTAURANT Dr. Clark opened in 2020, it took over a space on Bayard Street formerly occupied by Winnie’s, the karaoke dive that closed in 2015 after a 28-year run. (It reopened in 2019 on East Broadway.) “We started getting these OG Winnie’s customers, Chinese people from the neighborhood, gallery people,” says Yudai Kanayama, a co-owner of Dr. Clark. “For us, it was very important to keep the legacy of Winnie’s alive.” So the owners started hosting outdoor karaoke during the summer of 2020 (“It got almost too crazy—we started packing the whole street,” says Kanayama”), eventually moving the whole thing inside when indoor dining returned. Now, on Mondays at 11 p.m., a server turns on the screen (tucked between hanging dried plants from Green River Project, which did the interiors) and people sing in English, Japanese, and Mandarin between shochu highballs and Sapporos. “It’s a chill vibe and then it’s just, like, party time,” says actor and philosophy grad student (and regular) Billie Alexopoulos. “Everybody joins in, and it’s rowdy, it’s crazy, it’s a transformation.” (“I saw Lorde there once,” says Vanity Fair art columnist Nate Freeman. “I think she was a little surprised when karaoke started going down.”)