Mr Eddy Buckingham is a total New Yorker, which is to say he’s an immigrant from somewhere else. And the Melbourne-born restaurateur behind Chinese Tuxedo and the soon-to-be-opened Tyger lives and breathes his adopted hometown, and loves it with the passion of a true convert. A hobby-historian of The Bowery, the street on which he lives, he is, if not the official spokesperson for Manhattan’s Chinatown, where Tuxedo is located, then at least a pretty good amateur. “I love the Bowery,” he says, “its place in the culture. I’ve constructed my whole life so that I never have to leave my neighbourhood. My idea of leisure time when I go on vacation is to read history books about the street that I live on – Devil’s Mile is a pretty recent one, which is an exhaustive history of the street.”

As a young man, Mr Buckingham found jobs in restaurants and bars sort of by default, he says – after the global downturn, there weren’t a lot of jobs for a young lad kicking around Melbourne, failing his university media studies classes. He liked the idea of nightlife, not to mention the lifestyle, and really took to the culture, working his way up to manage several spots in Melbourne simultaneously, and then working his way up to Sydney to open The Ivy. But he always had his eye on New York. A long visit to the city in May 2009 (“at the beginning of Obama’s America,” he says with bright-eyed nostalgia), turned into a recon mission to find a sponsor and a job that would facilitate his move, which followed a few months later (“serving burgers and Bud Lights in Midtown,” he says).

Three years ago, with his business partner Mr Jeff Lam, Mr Buckingham opened Tuxedo at the bend in the elbow of Chinatown’s famous Doyers Street. In very short order, the fabulous, sunken main room of Tuxedo became a favourite for the fashion, finance and foodie crowds (where on any given night you may be sat next to a Clinton, a tequila baron, or a celebrity chef), while Peachy’s – Mr Buckingham’s bar next door, deep underground – became a beloved late-night cocktail spot. The food, too, a contemporary reinterpretation of Chinese cuisine from chef Mr Paul Donnelly (a Scot!), is worth the trip.

This spring, Mr Buckingham will open his new venture, Tyger, an all-day East Asian restaurant with a little lilt of Thai, Malay, Indochinese and Indonesian, at One Howard Street, a five-minute walk from both his apartment and from Tuxedo. As he ducked in and out of the building site there, and to the glittering Lunar New Year parties and fashion parties and dinners at Tuxedo, we tagged along with Mr Buckingham to see how he manages to navigate his life in Chinatown, and do it so stylishly.

For someone who works late, Mr Buckingham wakes up fairly early. “These days, I probably have a 9.00am start at home,” he says. “Black coffee and I go over the reports from Tuxedo and Peachy’s. I really like to go with the flow, so I set a framework that permits improvisation. It’s no accident where I’ve opened the venues I have – I can walk from my apartment to Tuxedo to Tyger and home in a 15-minute triangle (which may seem narrow, but when we are serving 1,500 to 2,000 people a week at work…). So I don’t even have to leave the neighbourhood. And situating my home close to work makes it a great deal easier. If I had a substantial commute or relied on public transport, some of those things would be more difficult.

“We’ve had a lot of approaches to expand Tuxedo or other concepts into other markets, be they in New York, some national, some international, but it’s not the lifestyle I want. I’d have to run a diary so carefully. And if we were to do something in Miami or Vegas… I don’t want to work for the casino owners. I worked hard to not have a boss. I don’t want to go and work for a bloke like [casino magnate] Steve Wynn.”

“I roll into Tuxedo by 10.00am, black coffee in hand, probably two coffees at that juncture. There’ll be a series of meetings. They might be design meetings, meetings about a new menu with our head chef, meetings about an event with my events coordinator, or meetings with our financial controller.” These days, the staff of Tuxedo is around 90. The restaurant is open seven days a week, so there is always something going on. “It is definitely more than a job, but it’s also less than a life,” Mr Buckingham says, joking, “and it’s taken a long time to get here – it took my twenties, riddled with periods of inertia, and a kind of benign alcoholism, to get here. But I love my life. I love restaurants because I fucking love dinner parties.”

The palm-fringed main room in Tuxedo is quickly becoming a kind of icon of Downtown, one he’s really proud of. “I do have a creative bone and I do like to scratch it and developing restaurants and running a team gives me an opportunity to run a for-profit business and mix it up every few years.” But the food is very close to home for him. “Obviously this town does Italian better than Tuscany,” he says. “There is a big French tradition, too. Manhattan is the nexus of contemporary Americana and I’m not going to take on Gramercy Tavern or Pastis, the critical ideal of the category. In Australia, East Asian food has the same sort of influence that maybe Latin American food does here. The great chefs of Australia, they’re not cooking traditional French preparations. They’re cooking with Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese influences. The Flower Drum, a Cantonese restaurant, is to Melbourne what Le Bernardin is to New York. So, almost organically, I wouldn’t say a degree of expertise, but definitely a strong field of interest, from my partner Jeff who emigrated here from China in the late 1970s and myself.”

“When I opened the restaurant – I don’t want to think about it – I still fitted into my Sid Mashburn suit,” he says. “Now I don’t, so I train twice a week with Nick, the head trainer at S10. He’s also friend of mine. He’s from Melbourne. But this is where you start to hit that point with time versus money. I’m better served having very focused, very targeted projects with Nick for those couple of hours a week rather than placing the time elsewhere. He gets on me that I’ll never hit the marks I want to with what I consume. But that’s the deal with the devil I’m willing to make. We come at it from a different mindset. He comes at it from a trainer’s principle. I come from restaurateur’s principle. I’m training with him so I can consume what I want to consume.”

Mr Buckingham says he doesn’t make five-year plans and tries not to get too lost in the micro, either. “I think, what would make this year cool? What will I have fun with this year to start next year?” It’s a controlled portion of ambition, risk and headaches that he feels comfortable with and is healthy for him. And this year that ambition is Tyger, at the eastern “dead” end of Howard Street. “Ambition can be a virtue or a jail sentence and I want to make sure I stay on the virtue side of it,” he says. “I think it might in part be the Australian attitude. But there’s a lot of stress around opening a new thing. You take it to market, you don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s like you’re showing your heart and soul to people a little bit and then maybe it won’t land.” Even with the construction and other businesses running apace, he says, he makes time to sneak out on little dining and drinking sorties to see what’s going on out there in the wide world. “The thing I love about the hospitality industry is it kind of exists at the nexus of culture and commerce,” Mr Buckingham says. “And I still make it out to do a little R&D, some community building.”

As his company has grown, Mr Buckingham’s role within it has begun to evolve, too. He is less hands-on in every department now, from HR or ordering and events, and he jokes that he is now just in everyone’s way, doing more shaking hands and kissing babies than running food and training staff. His job, he says, is to talk to people. And Mr Buckingham isn’t the sort of light, flippant cocktail-banter kind of host. He really locks in, dives right into deep talk, deep connection with his interlocutors. He is incredibly present. Or is that an impresario’s technique? “I think I get it from my mother,” he says, of his appetite for real, genuine connection. “Also, I’m coming up on 10 years in therapy and realising how empowered I’ve been, to live where I wanted to live, and in how I get to interact with people. I don’t have a boss to kiss the ass of. I need to service and hopefully delight and engage our guests. But you kind of get to choose when you have the choice. I want to be golden and feel like I’ve come away from it with a friend. What a win.”