Here’s a new meaning to getting lost in the sauce. Last weekend, Asian-American cultural platform Ginseng Museum joined forces with DIY events collective 3rd Space to host a rave in a New York dim sum restaurant, serving up an inter-continental lineup of acts from East Asia and its global diaspora – including DMV digicore rapper and TooManyStrikers alumni Kuru, tripped-out alt-rocker Helen Sun, the jazz-drum-and-bass fusions of Tokyo’s Takuya Nakamura and New York band Push Ups.

The unique concept first started taking shape when 3rd Space founder Spencer Papandrea and Ginseng Museum founder Jin Chang were walking through New York’s Chinatown looking for event spaces. “One restaurant owner suggested this dim sum lounge-slash-banquet hall, and as soon as we stepped in we knew it was perfect,” says Spencer Papandrea. “It only felt right to give the guests the full dim sum experience.” The space aligned with Ginseng Museum’s longtime philosophy of combining food and music – with the event’s title, “Life is nothing more than eating, drinking, and listening to music”, being paraphrased from late Hong Kong food critic and writer Chua Lam’s famous musings on simple pleasures.

The fusion of diasporic Asian culture, meanwhile, has been written into Ginseng Museum from its onset. It all started with the brief TikTok blackout in the US in January of last year – during which time a number of Chinese-American internet users migrated over to Chinese social media platforms like RedNote in response. “It was really interesting because it felt like one of the first times a Chinese social media platform suddenly had Chinese and international users all interacting in the same space,” says Chang. “That moment made me realize there were so many interesting artists, communities, and scenes coming out of Asia and the Asian diaspora, but there wasn’t really a platform or brand connecting all of them together – especially one introducing them to an international audience.” 

Last weekend’s dim sum rave was the latest chapter in this journey, fostering a rather unexpected encounter between the 20-year-old hyper-digital sonics of Kuru, the trumpetering of 57-year-old Nakamura (who recently caught eyes and ears with this genre-colliding The Lot set), and, of course, dumplings on the dancefloor. “Seeing Kuru’s fanbase cheering as Nakamura, the surprise guest, took out his trumpet [was a highlight],” says Papandrea. “It was a beautiful cross-generational moment.” 

Catch a closer look at the event in the gallery above.