Take a look inside the kitchen at the just opened Red Farm Chinese restaurant in Austin

New York City import Red Farm Chinese restaurant opened Wednesday in downtown Austin. We took a tour of the kitchen with one of the restaurant’s longtime managers, Jeff Goldin, who calls himself the restaurant’s “Dumpling Ambassador,” to get a sense of what diners can expect from this ambitious operation.

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The restaurant features a massive kitchen with five high-powered wok stations set on a metal cooking surface covered with constantly flowing cold water; two stations for cooking, cooling and drying of Peking duck, a process than can take up to three days; a room designated for dim sum preparations, where four chefs may prep up to 4,000 pieces in a day; and enough space for up to 22 cooks to prepare meals for 150 guests at a time.

We caught up with Red Farm co-founder Zachary Chodorow and Red Farm Austin partner Jesse Herman in the spring to talk about how and why the NY-based restaurant ended up in Austin.

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Chodorow, whose family company China Grill Management has operated restaurants everywhere from Los Angeles to London, says he’d been approached by investment groups and wealthy food lovers with no restaurant experience over the years about trying to replicate Red Farm’s success outside of NYC. But no potential deal grabbed his interest until talking to Herman about Austin, which Chodorow said just felt right.

Herman, who worked as a partner at New Waterloo for several years before leaving to work as an independent operator, worked in NYC for a decade before his 15 years in Austin, which he says have helped him refine his understanding on what works well in town and what the city is missing.

“In the last 15 years or so, we’ve had an explosion of restaurants here, not necessarily an explosion of cuisines,” Herman told the American-Statesman earlier this year. “There’s a lot of underserved cuisines, or you might not have a spectrum of experiences across that cuisine, from strip mall to high-end places. Just having had the food and experience, to me it translated pretty easily to what we would like here.”

Check out the full conversation and backstory here.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Take a look inside Red Farm Chinese restaurant now open in Austin