Louie & Chan

A Broome Street tale to head to the basement

Before the first record played, Louie & Chan was already traveling with a Lower East Side fable: Luigi Russo, a Neapolitan shoemaker, and Tu Sing Chan, a circus tightrope walker, supposedly crossed Eldridge in 1925 and found a storefront with a basement. The story was made up. The venue, however, was not: a two-story building at 303 Broome Street, at the intersection of Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side.

David Wiesner and Nicole Delacratz-Wiesner, coming from Grotto, took almost four years to build it. The restaurant opened on November 16, 2013; the303, the basement club, arrived a few weeks later.

Neapolitan trattoria upstairs, Chan downstairs

On the ground floor, Pasquale Frola and pizzaiolo Michele Bisogno—later chef Kevin Chun—maintained a 44-seat trattoria: wood-fired oven, pastas, tufted banquettes, and marble tables. In the back, a discreet staircase led down to the basement. There, the venue presented Chan's world: Chinese-inspired cocktails, dark baseboards, a rosewood bar, chinoiserie accents, and an intimate lounge with banquettes.

It was not a mega-nightclub. It was a low-ceiling lounge-club with a wooden dance floor and a DJ booth close to the crowd, with no velvet rope or bottle service.

the303, home of house and rarities

Nickodemus, from Turntables on the Hudson, and Wiseacre, from the Lift, were in charge of the music policy. The programming was eclectic and dance-floor oriented: house, disco, soul, afrobeat, and electronic. That booth hosted Ron Trent, DJ Spinna—with a tribute to Frankie Knuckles at the No Limits party—, Tedd Patterson with TSoNYC, Quantic, Rich Medina, and series like Electrafrique, AFROKINETIC, or Cousin Cousin. On Thursdays, the303 presents focused on underground house; on Fridays, the venue opened the night to local DJs. In 2016, the label the303 Music released Sounds of the303, Vol. 1, featuring residents and guests of that club.

The installation by Canal Sound & Light left Void Acoustics and QSC amplification on the lower floor, with Technics and Pioneer in the booth.

The basement went dark on Broome Street

The venue remained in operation at least until 2018, including noise complaints from neighbors, and then the brand was shut down. In October 2019, Canary Club occupied the same 303 Broome Street. Louie & Chan is no longer open. What remains is a rare downtown hybrid: a trattoria upstairs and, downstairs, a small club that treated the Chinese-Italian intersection as a single neighborhood.