It’s been open less than two years, tucked into a narrow storefront a few doors from a smoke shop and a dry cleaner, on a block most people only pass through on their way to the Queensboro Bridge. And this week, the city’s most closely watched restaurant critic walked away from it with a verdict that reframes the entire neighborhood — arguing that a stretch of Manhattan long synonymous with playing it safe might now be home to one of its boldest, and hottest, kitchens.
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The restaurant is Lungi, the South Indian and Sri Lankan spot at 1136 First Avenue near East 63rd Street, and on Tuesday it pulled two stars and a Critic’s Pick from The New York Times — chief critic Ligaya Mishan’s first full-length review of the place. Two stars lands at “very good” on the paper’s four-star scale, a rare designation for a restaurant that opened in the fall of 2024.Mishan’s framing is what makes the review sing for the neighborhood. The Upper East Side, she notes, has historically leaned French and Italian, later warmed to Japanese, and lately picked up Thai — but always with the heat dialed down for a cautious crowd. Lungi pushes the other way. The chiles build slowly and then keep climbing, and the kitchen treats heat as one flavor among many rather than the whole point, shifting from plate to plate. Her tongue-in-cheek question: could this be, technically, the spiciest restaurant on the Upper East Side?
The dishes that earned the praise span both regions. Mishan singled out the mutton rolls — a deep-fried Sri Lankan snack from the tradition of “short eats” — along with hoppers, the bowl-shaped fermented-rice pancakes; a Guntur chile mushroom curry; Kerala beef chukka; Malabar parota; Sri Lankan prawn kari; and sura puttu, a flaked baby-shark dish available only on weekends. The Sunday banana-leaf virundhu, a sprawling feast of rice, biryani, curries and sambols, also drew attention. Short eats and small plates run $8 to $30, with biryani, curries and roasts from $24 to $50; the Sunday spread is $49.99.
The food traces back to chef and co-owner Albin Vincent, who grew up in Kanyakumari at the southern tip of mainland India. Orphaned at six, he was raised by grandparents who had spent 25 years in Colombo, and the menu is his attempt to bring his grandmother’s cooking to life. To pull it off, he and co-owner Mervyn Winston assembled a kitchen drawn from across the region — cooks from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka — converting what had been a more generic Indian small-plates spot into a restaurant built squarely around the south.
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The honor caps a fast climb. Lungi earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand in both 2024 and 2025, and just last month it became a first-time honoree on the Times’ annual ranking of the city’s best restaurants, landing at No. 59 — one of only two Upper East Side rooms to make the cut.The review wasn’t a clean sweep. Mishan found the service uneven from visit to visit and described an awkward, sliced-up storefront, with one understaffed night leaving the bathrooms in rough shape. Her bottom line, even so: go anyway.
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