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Arielle Haspel, a Manhattan health coach with a sleek social media presence, wanted to open the kind of Chinese restaurant, she said , where she and her food-sensitive clients could eat. One where the lo mein wouldn’t make people feel “bloated and icky” the next day, or one where the food wasn’t “too oily” or salty, as she wrote in an Instagram post a few weeks ago.

She chose a name for her new restaurant, Lucky Lee’s, that sounded stereotypically Chinese, even though she and her husband, Lee, are not Asian. She decorated the restaurant with bamboo and jade touches, and designed her logo with a chopstick-inspired font.

And then, quite predictably, she was flamed on the internet for it .

The uproar over Lucky Lee’s, which opened on Monday, has become the latest front in the debate over cultural appropriation and cultural arrogance, following controversies involving, among many others, Dolce & Gabbana and Miley Cyrus.

In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Haspel said that she had good intentions, and that she was shocked when she was portrayed by critics on social media as the latest in a string of white restaurateurs who have promoted their Asian cuisine by labeling it as superior to food made by actual Asians.