Sibling Rivalry

Congee Bowery Restaurant and Bar

207 Bowery (betw. Rivington & Spring Sts.)

212-766-2828

Several years back, my girlfriend Adrianne lived in a disease-vectoring Chinese tenement on Delancey Street. Women with yellow teeth deboned fish in the stairwell, and dead rats dropped from the water-damaged ceiling like a plague, payback for breaking a commandment: "Though shalt not gentrify."

Yet she lived steps from a silver lining called Congee Village. The multilevel Chinese restaurant (décor: bamboo and faux tropical forest) served up cheap, steaming congee (Cantonese rice porridge studded with delectables like black mushrooms and frog meat), bubbling casseroles, cheap drinks and karaoke. Perpetually abuzz with conversation and laughter, Congee felt like an everyone's-invited party.

Despite its immense size, hourlong weekend waits were de rigueur. Hence, to tame crowds, we find brand-new sibling Congee Bowery. It's located on a condo-crazed stretch of the Bowery, beside the Crash Mansion club and a kitchen-supply store. Congee Bowery is an attention-grabber from the first step: You're standing on an inlaid fish tank filled with shimmying fish. (It's akin to P.S. 1's entrance floor, where a tiny tv features a woman fruitlessly leaping upward.) Scuff the fish bye-bye, and head downstairs to the sleek, clean, cavernous bar.

The cloud-scraping ceilings and unnervingly bright lighting nix coziness, while flat-screen tvs, transmitting The Simpsons and a Chinese newscast, amplify the bar's emptiness on a Wednesday evening. Chinatown locals and condo-dwellers don't flock until the weekend. Still, with stone walls, rough-hewn wooden tables and anachronistic touches (like the men's bathroom door, decorated by top hat and cane), the bar is not displeasing. Actually, it's ideal for a clandestine rendezvous-really, who'd expect you here?

I sidle up to the bartender, a young man with a white dress shirt, tinted glasses and hair like a Koosh ball. He's chopping and pureeing watermelons with an intensity reserved for a hated task.

"Do you have a happy hour?"

"No."

"Why not? You need to have a happy hour."

"I'm not the manager," he says, taking a step back. A shoulder-shrug drives the point home.

"Okay, let's start over. What's your best drink?" I peruse a pink list that would make a high school girl swoon: Sex on the Beach, Purple Haze, Grasshopper the Zombie-

"Don't order the Zombie," he says. "It's not very good."

A bartender honest about his skills and limitations. A nice change. "So what's good?"

"The Lychee Martini."

I order one. The martini ($5) arrives with a toothpick speared through a white lychee fruit apparently drowned in formaldehyde. The libation is syrupy sweet, like canned pears, but strong enough that I choke it back, diabetic shock be damned. Best stick to standards like gin and tonics ($5) and bottled beer like Tsing Tao ($4) or, sadly, Budweiser.

When I cash out, the bill arrives with a surprise: The martini costs $6, not $5. The bartender half apologizes. "That's coming out of your tip," I joke, and he looks at me like I've just won Asshole of the Year. I shrug my shoulders and trundle upstairs for a nosh.

Sumptuous rooms unfold like origami, each corner revealing a new banquet nook (and VIP karaoke rooms that, as the bartender sadly informed me, feature a retro song list-"Girls like it, but guys hate it," he says). In the main room, handsome wood huts (named "East Village" and "Hong Kong," among others) hold large, extended families chopsticking verdant greens with garlic slivers and sizzling eel. The menu, nearly note for note, replicates the original Congee Village. This is a good thing.

A curt man with a sharp suit jots down my dim sum order. Pan-fried shrimp rice roll ($2.50) comes crunchily perfect, as does the scallion pancake ($2.95). The steamed vegetable dumplings ($2.50), however, arrive mushy and flavorless, while the juicy buns ($3.95) prematurely leaked their juice. Yet with several hundred menu items, you'll likely find suitable bits of animal flesh.

Mopping up my plate, I ponder another drink downstairs, but the bar's still a ghost town. Sure, Congee Bowery is spanking new, and in time it will likely attract a loyal clientele. But what will that change? It's an imitation of a masterpiece, a Mona Lisa knockoff with a lip-curling frown. If Congee were a novel concept, I'd sing its accolades. Yet as it stands, it can't hold a bowl of porridge to its older sibling.