Support Chinatown!

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These days, businesses in Chinatown are struggling to make ends meet as potential customers’ trepidation over COVID-19 festers and deters patronage. Chinatown has been an ineffable source of joy, gratification, and comfort for so many of us. That’s why I’ve organized a visit to one of the neighborhood’s stalwarts, Wu’s Wonton King, with one of my dinner groups to show our support. Now is the time for all of us to do the right thing.

Read Chinatown Needs Your Love More Than Ever Right Now in Food & Wine.
 
 

Rustic Table Shuk

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Instagram Post 3/8/2020

Your choices for food vendors in the new Essex Market, 88 Essex St on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, are certainly plentiful, and since the opening of The Market Line downstairs, they’re positively daunting. But since I believe that the best method for conquering the overwhelming is to partialize the task, here’s the first, with more anon.

My understanding is that Israeli inflected Rustic Table has a location on Very West 42nd Street, but this is about their Market Line venue, Rustic Table Shuk, aptly named since shuk (שׁוּק) is the Hebrew word for market, a cognate to souk in Arabic.

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This is their take on trendy Arayes, pita bread stuffed with deftly seasoned ground grass-fed beef (it’s often lamb or a blend in the Levant from which it hails), grilled (Lebanon’s answer to panini, perhaps), anointed with pumpkinseed oil, and served in a puddle of tahini. The distinguishing characteristic of good arayes is that the outside of the pita is crisp…

…while the meat juices saturate its underside. As you can see, this one succeeded.
 
 

Ginjan Cafe

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Instagram Post 3/7/2020

A perfect pick-me-up from Ginjan Café, 85 East 125th St in East Harlem.

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On the left, tart Bissap (aka sorrel and jamaica), a West African (notably Senegalese) blend of hibiscus, mint, lemon, and cloves, served hot; at the top, Ginjan, an “organic elixir” of ginger, lemon, pineapple, vanilla, and anise – steamed, although classic and latte options are available; and a blueberry scone because…

…you couldn’t have resisted either.
 
 

Ameer Bakery

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Instagram Post 3/6/2020

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My dining buddy and I were on our way between hither and yon in Paterson, NJ when we passed Ameer Bakery at 243 Buffalo Ave. We ventured in at a particularly fortuitous moment as trays of these Middle Eastern pies (manakish, مناقيش) were just emerging hot from the oven. Two types of cheese were meltingly evident; when I inquired, I was told “mozzarella” and “Arabic cheese”. The vicissitudes of helpful linguistic interpretation being what they are, I’m going to speculate that the bottom layer was akkawi (a bit like mozzarella) and the random plops atop, puffy and a bit salty, were nabulsi – but I’m guessing. No guesswork was involved, however, concerning how delicious these Palestinian pies were. My gratitude to the management for comping us these savory treats.
 
 

Heros & Villains

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Instagram Post 3/5/2020

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Sometimes you just want a big ol’ sammich and nothing else will do, and I found a number of likely candidates while prowling around Essex Market (88 Essex St) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I spied this over-the-top example at Heros & Villains, stall 41, called The Big Kahuna: dry-aged beef from neighboring Essex Street Shambles (shambles being an archaic term for an open-air slaughterhouse and meat market) onions, peppers, pickles, aioli, cheese sauce, spicy ketchup, lettuce and tomato. Happily, you could still taste that the meat was of good quality even through the agreeable jumble of sauces (all made from scratch). Craving satisfied.
 
 

Thai Cook (at iCook)

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When I write about restaurants on Instagram, they’re usually brief takes accompanied by a photo or two. (You can see my feed right here on ethnojunkie.com, updated almost daily, by selecting the “Instagram” category from my home page – no signup required.) But because of Instagram’s character count limitations, it’s often necessary to break up a review into several parts. This one originally appeared as six posts, published on January 27-29 and March 1-3, 2020.

I was no stranger to the food at Am Thai Bistro on Church Ave in Brooklyn and always thought it was a cut above the norm for the area (if not especially creative) so I surmised we’d be in relatively good hands at its owner’s new undertaking, Thai Cook in Elmhurst. Sharing space with iCook Buffet, a BBQ/hotpot place at 81-17 Broadway, the menu couldn’t be more different from its Flatbush sibling; IMO this venture is the real deal and easily stands up to its neighborhood Thai competitors of renown.

Ten of us assembled there for lunch (which is code for we had the opportunity to taste ten different dishes) and another six for dinner (and another six dishes) and therein lies the rub: we all agreed that everything we ordered was outstanding, so I’m stymied by culinary mastery and can’t recommend favorites. Therefore let us stipulate that you won’t go wrong with any of the items in this post (presented in no particular order). Incidentally, don’t forget to order sticky rice with your meal. Some dishes do come with regulation rice – see photos – but all of the sauces are so delicious that you’ll surely want some sticky rice to soak up every drop!

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Fresh Crepe

We started with Fresh Crepe: a rice flour wrap swaddling bean curd, sweet radish, and chives served with sweet soy-garlic sauce. I believe the crispy bits were Thai cuisine’s answer to chicharrones; they elevated the dish significantly.

Grilled Squid

Amazingly tender scored squid with sweet/sour/spicy sauce and peanuts. More yummy crispy bits.

Tum Thai Cook

From the Papaya Salad section of the menu. Mixed seafood (with that incredibly tender squid), blue crab, shrimp, and New Zealand mussels. Very spicy.

Aob Woon Sen

We opted for shrimp although crab and veggie versions are available; it highlights oyster mushrooms, celery, sliced ginger, pork belly, and glass noodles and is served with their signature Millionaire sauce. The sauce is chef Boonnum Thongngoen’s custom recipe for the classic Thai sauce of chilies, garlic, shallots, cilantro, sawtooth coriander, makrut lime leaf, fish sauce and lime juice. She named it in honor of her husband who lost a metaphorical million in failed restaurants back in Thailand but retained his family recipe for the bespoke sauce. Excellent.

Pork Liver Yum

Yum, the onomatopoeically named Thai salad, typically features one or two key ingredients accompanied by some form of allium along with fresh herbs and is characterized by a dressing of fish sauce, lime juice, lemongrass, garlic, sugar, and chilies – always plenty of chilies. This yum set the spotlight on flavorful Pork Liver with red onion and scallions pointed up with cilantro and mint; perfect for this liver lover.

Spicy Oyster Yum

Another yum, in this case with oysters (they’re in there), accompanied by red onion and scallions in cilantro/mint/lime sauce with crispy fried shallots on top and their signature Millionaire dressing on the side. Good stuff.

Lime Chili Sliced Pork

From the Steamed portion of the menu, sliced pork rolled around tiny enoki mushrooms with a lemongrass, mint, cilantro, chili, and fresh lime juice dressing.

Not a squid: those are the enoki mushrooms oozing out of the pork!

Coconut Crab Curry Noodle

From the Noodle & Rice section of the menu. Spicy Southern Thai yellow curry with vermicelli noodles and pickled mustard greens. No discernable crab meat, but the flavor was there. And a hardboiled egg.

Panang Curry

Also from the Noodle & Rice corner, Home Cooked Style Panang Curry (coconut milk) with beef. We did the pork version at a subsequent meal; both were great. And a hardboiled egg.

Khua Kling

From Mom’s Specials, a spicy Southern Thai dish with dried beef and curry paste. And a hardboiled egg.

Striped Bass

I asked if there were any specials that day and was rewarded with this grilled striped bass with a perfectly harmonized sauce on the side.

Larb Moo

Larb (you might see laab), a spicy ground meat salad with origins in Laos that migrated to the Isaan region of Thailand, shows up among the yums on the menu; moo means pork (easy to remember because of the barnyard irony). This one costars ground pork and pork intestine in a chili lime dressing. Good stuff.

Pressed Pork & Egg Yolk Yum

Speaking of yums (in both languages), this Yum with Pressed Pork & Egg Yolk is worth getting and doesn’t duplicate the porks above. If you’ve had Vietnamese bánh mì, chances are you’ve had pressed pork, a delicious bologna-like sausage. If you haven’t tasted salted duck egg yolk, you need to without further ado.

Fresh Crepe with Tom Yum Noodle

Ground pork, fish balls, shrimp, and crispy fried pork skin piled on top of rice flour wraps in a spicy tom yum sauce. The fresh crepe Starter without all the accoutrements shown above is fine, but look to the Noodle & Rice section of the menu for this (even better IMO) choice.

Papaya Salad with Thai Peanut and Salted Egg

There are nine variations on the theme of Papaya Salad on the menu, all of which are pretty spicy, so be forewarned.

Thai Cook is located at 81-17 Broadway in Elmhurst, Queens. It shares a space with iCook Buffet and once inside it’s easy to access one from the other, but cognoscenti will use the entrance on the right and walk down the hallway to hit the heights directly.
 
 

Wu’s Wonton King

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Instagram Post 2/21-24/2020  and  3/16-22/2020

It seems to me that authentic Cantonese cuisine is often overlooked in favor of other, less subtle, regional Chinese fare. That may be because Chinese-American food, a poor excuse for gastronomy IMO but a stepping stone for the totally uninitiated I guess, has its roots in Guangdong.

Our group recently visited Wu’s Wonton King at 165 East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown and came away more than pleased – so much so that I brought another group there a few weeks later! Here’s a compilation of everything both groups enjoyed.

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You’ve probably had mediocre wonton soup with nondescript flaccid dumplings in Chinese restaurants so many times that you don’t even bother to order it. It seems to be ubiquitous. But I urge you to try Wu’s New York Number 1 Wonton Soup. The sturdy dumplings packed with shrimp, pork, and watercress are bathed in a bone broth soup, cloudy, flavorful, and rich with collagen. A great starter for which they are justly famous.


Solo.


The inner workings.


Here are two dumpling orders from the Dim Sum section of the menu. Pan Fried Shrimp with Green Chives, just what it sounds like and totally delicious…


…and Steamed Chaozhou dumplings, halved so you could see the filling (and yeah, so we could share). Peanuts provide the crunch in these classic pouches in addition to an ample complement of carrots, peas, shiitake mushrooms, ground pork, and dried shrimp. Love these.

I was especially keen to try their take on a dish I’ve had elsewhere that features osmanthus clam/mussel. My “clam/mussel” equivocation stems from the fact that the seafood in question is actually neither. Rather, it is an internal component of the sea cucumber, an echinoderm that inhabits the ocean’s floor.

If you’re unenthusiastic when it comes to even reading about innards, skip to the next paragraph. Now. Sea cucumbers have a soft, sausage-shaped body with no solid appendages and don’t even have a proper brain, so one might reason that they wouldn’t be particularly adept at self-defense against predators – but for one saving grace. From Wikipedia: “Some species of coral-reef sea cucumbers…can defend themselves by expelling their sticky cuvierian tubules to entangle potential predators…in an autotomic process known as evisceration.” [I’ve heard the term “stomach eversion”. Simply put, they literally puke their guts out.] “Replacement tubules grow back in one and a half to five weeks, depending on the species.” The tubules look very much like squid tentacles which is how they appear on the plate. Here’s a photo from Ripley’s in vivo.

That having been said, the name of this absolutely delicious dish is 脆奶拼雙蚌, #10 on the Seafood section of the menu; its English name is Sautéed Clam with Fried Milk (although the menu uses a different word for “fried”).


As presented: there are king oyster mushrooms and sautéed asparagus beneath the Chinese chives and clams. It’s pricier than some other menu items, but I thought it was excellent.


Post-bite close-up of the crispy, sweet, creamy fried milk; these could be a snack by themselves. So good.


Close-up of a clam; its flavor and appearance are similar to that of a razor clam but perhaps a bit more slippery and chewy. Now here’s where I need some help from the cognoscenti among you. Is that red bit (which tasted completely different from the other part, brinier and spicier for sure) part of the clam, or something different? TIA for the info!


Our foray into the real deal at Wu’s Wonton King was rewarded with this bowl of Pan Fried Noodles with Seafood.


Revealing the crispy noodles beneath that are the raison d’être of this dish.

They say that timing is everything and that’s surely the case with this presentation. Mix well: if you start crunching before the sauce has a chance to permeate the noodles, you’re missing the point; wait too long and the rich seafood mélange will have saturated and drowned them into a submission of sogginess. Nope. There is a window of culinary opportunity in which the noodles still have crunch but have absorbed enough of the sauce to be flavorful – and that’s what you’re going for.

This may very well be the best rendition of Cantonese pan fried noodles with you-name-it I’ve ever had.


You’ve probably gazed at the awesome roasted/BBQ meats (and sometimes cuttlefish if you’re lucky) hanging in the windows at Cantonese restaurants: roast pork, roast pig, soy sauce chicken, and so many more. The collective term for these favorites is siu mei (燒味), not to be confused with the popular dim sum dumpling, shu mai (燒賣). But if you’d like a change from roast duck, give this marinated braised duck, beautifully rare and perfectly succulent, a try.


I’ve worked my way through most of the duck options on the menu from roast to marinated braised. This one is Honey Roast Duck; gotta love that sweet and shiny skin protecting the succulent meat within.


Check out the framed posters on the wall and you’ll spot “Dried Squid Sautéed Fried with Silver Anchovy”; it was that photo that tempted us and it proved to be another outstanding choice. (It’s “Dried Squid Stir Fry”, #16 on the Seafood section of the menu, if you don’t see it on the wall.) Tender squid contrasted with the crispy little fish, but don’t envision European salted anchovies packed in oil like you might find on a pizza; these are half a world apart. Literally. I’ll be returning with a different group very soon, and this dish is at the top of our gotta-do-this-again list.


If you’ve never tried a Chinese casserole you should add it to your repertoire. The cooking vessel is a clay pot and the variety of recipes and ingredients seems limitless. Often a rice dish with a crispy bottom layer, this one is a rich home style stew featuring chunks of lamb and bean curd sticks – another example of bean curd skin’s many guises (see this recent post).


To me, this dish is Sichuan comfort food: the menu calls it Shredded Pork with Garlic Sauce, the commonly used descriptor. The Chinese characters are 鱼香肉丝, literally fish flavor (or fragrance) shredded pork, but don’t infer that it tastes like (or contains) fish from the phrase “fish flavor”; it simply refers to a method often used for cooking fish, and it’s delicious. A little sweet, a little sour from vinegar, accented by the omnipresent garlic and ginger, it’s chili sauce based – and it’s the kind of chili sauce that tastes a bit like ketchup. (As a matter of fact, one theory holds that the word ketchup comes from the Cantonese words “keh jap”, literally tomato sauce, but there are others of course.) Etymology notwithstanding, the dish is classic.


This is Snow Pea Sprout with Dried Scallop. The dish as presented has the appearance of an ocean of sauce with a school of shredded dried scallops swimming just beneath the surface.


Only by parting the sea are the snow pea shoots revealed. Subtle and delectable.


Chinese Broccoli (gai lan), stripped of its leaves, included here to dispel the myth that I tend to overlook vegetables. 😉


Complimentary mango jelly for dessert.
 
 
Wu’s Wonton King is located at 165 East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
 
 

Al Raouche Restaurant

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Instagram Post 2/29/2020

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Brain and brain! What is brain?

This is brain, lamb brain to be precise, one of the mezza (you might see meze) available on weekends at Al Raouche, the Lebanese restaurant at 169 Crooks Ave, Paterson, NJ. Boiled and marinated, possessing a texture that was yielding but with the tiniest bit of resistance, naturally mild in flavor and not at all gamey, it was so fantastically garlicky that you wouldn’t know you were eating lamb. That, plus a generous drenching of olive oil and lemon juice provided the dominant character of the dish. And that’s a good thing, Miri.
 
 

Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist

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Instagram Post 2/28/2020

If pizza is a romance between Italian and American cuisines, then I guess that would make Indian Pizza a ménage a trois. And, yes, it’s a thing in India too. (Indian pizza, that is.) Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist is a franchise with at least 45 locations in the US, one of which is 259-07 Hillside Ave in Floral Park, the focus of this post.

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You’re looking at a half Butter Chicken, half Tandoori Paneer model; other toppings include Paneer Tikka Masala, Curry Paneer, Aloo Chaat, and Palak Paneer (with pesto sauce, of course) among many more.


Isolating a slice of each (chicken left, paneer right) reveals a disappointing similarity that I had tried to avoid though considerable deliberation when we were ordering; I don’t know if alternative choices would have mattered. The dominance of red onion, garlic, ginger, cilantro, and tomato overwhelmed any subtleties that the two mild sauces and toppings might have brought to these slices. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t bad at all, I was just after a little more variety at the time.

(I do know about Korean pizza and other international suitors, but that’s a story for another day. 😉)