In restaurants, as in everything else, the aughts were a time of rampant gold-rush expansion, when a rabble of talented cooks (Boulud, Jean-Georges, Colicchio, Batali) stampeded over the fine-dining landscape, expanding their brands (restaurants, books, TV shows) in a kind of mad frenzy. It was a time, for many chefs, fraught with temptation and peril. Just ask Anita Lo, who opened her original flagship restaurant, Annisa, in a small, garage-size space down on Barrow Street exactly a decade ago. After making her name there, Lo attempted to expand her brand in all sorts of fashionable ways. She opened a dumpling chain, Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, with mixed success, appeared on the requisite cooking shows (Iron Chef, Top Chef Masters), and attempted to capitalize on the David Chang–induced Asian-barbecue craze with a West Village restaurant called Bar Q that closed, despite favorable reviews, less than a year after it opened. Then, last July, in a freak nighttime electrical fire, Annisa burned down, leaving Lo back more or less where she began.
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