“ I think we made the most of the space,” says Annie Shi, glancing around Lei, her 700-square-foot wine bar in New York’s Chinatown. “It’s intimate, which I think New Yorkers love.”

Lei landed on Doyers Street , a short curved pedestrian-only street rich with history, after a two-year search that took Shi all over downtown. But the opening is the culmination of many more years, stretching back to Shi’s start in the hospitality space.

“ When I was still working in finance, I was taking a restaurant operations course at NYU, and the reason was to open something with Chinese food and wine,” says Shi, who’s also the co-owner and beverage director of popular restaurants King and Jupiter . “The wine piece kind of evolved over time as well. The more time I spent at King and Jupiter, the m

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