Posted by Donny Tsang, January 19, 2012 at 9:00 AM
[Photographs: Donny Tsang]
We're big fans of dim sum at Serious Eats and Nom Wah Tea Parlor, on Doyer Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, does not disappoint. Nom Wah has been serving up dim sum since the early 1920s, and many of the chefs working in the kitchen have been there for 30 years—they're masters at what they do.
We spent a few hours in the kitchen with all the chefs to see how some of our favorite dim sum dishes were made.
Check out the slideshow for a peek into the kitchen.
Nom Wah Tea Parlor
13 Doyer Street, New York NY 10013 (map)
212-962-6047
nomwah.com
About the Author: Donny Tsang traded a life of traffic jams in LA for one of crowded subways in NYC, where he's been since 2003. Now he is a Brooklyn-based food photographer and founded the website Foodaissance, where he photographs local artisans.
Favorite this! (1)
Posted by Kathy YL Chan, January 6, 2012 at 3:00 PM
[Photo: Kathy YL Chan]
I often stop at Aji Ichiban during cold months to get my fill of dried ginger. Growing up, my grandma always encouraged me to snack on ginger to ward off colds and coughs. It seems to work, and is a habit I've kept till this day. You'll find a variety of dried ginger at Aji Ichiban, most priced at $6 per half-pound. It's more than what you'll pay at other Chinatown shops, but the fact that they keep this place extra clean and offer samples keeps me a loyal customer.
Plain dried ginger dusted in sugar (pictured on the right) is my go-to order. Simple, spicy, and straightforward, it's something I nibble on all day. Sometimes I'll drop a piece or two into hot black tea; the sugar sweetens the tea, and the ginger at the bottom of the cup, stripped of sugar, turns tender though stays equally spicy. They have a bunch of different ones including a lemon-preserved ginger and another with plum. And don't forget, you can sample any flavor before committing to a purchase.
Aji Ichiban
37 Mott Street, New York, NY 10038 (map)
212-233-7650
ajiichiban.com.hk/eng
About the author: Originally from Honolulu, Kathy YL Chan blogs at Kathy YL Chan, where she chronicles her eats and travels adventures between Hawai'i, New York and beyond. She firmly believes that there is always room for dessert.
Favorite this! (2)
Posted by Carey Jones, January 3, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Editor's note: January is Vegetable Month on Serious Eats: New York! Every day this month we'll introduce you to a different vegetable dish we love. Do you have a veg dish to nominate? Let us know!
[Photo: Jessica Leibowitz]
You can order Chinese flowering chives with beef, or duck, or scallops, or any number of other meats at Great NY Noodletown. We're fond of the shredded duck, but really, the reason to order is the vegetable itself. (How often do we say that when duck is involved?) Short segments are lightly stir-fried so that they're just cooked, with the vegetable as the prominent flavor—the familiar taste of chives, though more robust and in a slightly thicker, crisper, less wilt-able more cook-able form. They're bright and fresh-tasting enough to have you thinking of spring, even if winter has really yet to set in.
Great N.Y. Noodletown
28 Bowery, New York NY 10013 (near Bayard; map)
212-349-0923
Favorite this! (3)
Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, December 13, 2011 at 10:00 PM
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Anyone else wishing that the whole "I'm not going to put a sign up, people can find me" trend that started with the speakeasy revivals and has seemed to have infiltrated the realm of restaurants would go away? I certainly did when I was trying to locate Pulqueria, a new high-end Mexican bar and restaurant on Chinatown's Doyers Street. It's located in what was until recently a decades-old Vietnamese restaurant; it's the project of sister and brother team Heather and Christopher Tierney (of Apothéke). Once you do manage to locate it (look for candles leading you into an underground stairwell), the space is warm, festive, and inviting, though it's undoubtedly a scene.
The menu is large but focused, with sections that include apps, tacos, salsas, antojitos (little snacks), enchiladas, delicadezas (light entrees), fuertes (large entrees), and desserts. Each section has just a few carefully crafted selections.
Continue reading »
Favorite this! (4)
Posted by Carey Jones, December 13, 2011 at 1:00 PM
[Photo: Alice Gao]
In looking for great tofu in Chinatown, we headed down to Buddha Bodai where we tried the House Special Tofu ($12.95). We were split on whether we liked the brown sauce woven with strings of egg white; I found it bland and weak, others didn't mind it at all. But we were all quite happy with generous cubes of tofu, fried to a golden crisp with smooth, custardy innards.
This isn't the best fried tofu I've ever had, but it did remind me that I like fried tofu in just about any form. Where do you get fried tofu?
Buddha Bodai
5 Mott Street, New York 10013 (map)
212-566-8388
Favorite this! (0)
Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, December 6, 2011 at 10:00 PM
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Family Recipe
231 Eldridge Street, New York NY 10002 (between Stanton and E. Houston; map); 212-529-3133; familyrecipeny.com/
Service: Friendly and familial
Setting: Small but comfortable
Must-Haves: Menu changes regularly
Cost: $6 to $25 per dish
Grade: B
Tokyo-born chef-owner Akiko Turnauer has a pretty solid resume of restaurants under her belt, including stints at Nobu and SoHo's former Kitchen Club. Eschewing the high-end fusion trappings of her former employers, she's decided to go back to her traditional roots to bring homestyle Japanese cooking to her new Chinatown restaurant Family Recipe.
The food is not Japanese per se, but it's not meant to be. Rather, it draws on Akiko's childhood travels throughout the world with her food-obsessed father. Ingredients are strongly seasonal and high quality, while cooking techniques remain simple, mostly drawing from classic Japanese homestyle method—grilling, sauteeing, simmering, and steaming.
A small amuse of cucumber slices topped with a bit of well seasoned, smoky sauteed shredded cabbage set the tone for the meal. There's no question that this is home cooking. Not fancy, about as un-rarefied as you can get; straightforward and simple in its flavors. I'm not sure who the eponymous Alice is for the Alice's Pickles ($6) but I do like her style.
Continue reading »
Favorite this! (8)
Posted by Carey Jones, November 29, 2011 at 1:30 PM
[Photo: Alice Gao]
We've been on a tofu kick recently at Serious Eats. In its pure form, sure, refreshing and virtuous. But we've got no problem loading it down with meat and oil, either.
$10 is a lot for a plate of tofu in Chinatown, but the Pan Fried Bean Curd at Shanghai Cafe is a massive pile of food that could easily feed two with some rice on the side. The tofu itself is the reason to order it: hearty, thick slices firm enough to hold together, but soft and slippery and clean in flavor when they fall apart under your teeth. Greens and crumbled pork bits round it out. They're in a simple brown sauce that we agreed was a little salty (even to our taste) and a little MSG-y, but it's still a plenty satisfying plate of food.
About the author: Carey Jones is the Editor of Serious Eats New York and co-editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. Follow her on Twitter (@careyjones).
Shanghai Cafe
100 Mott Street, New York NY 10013 (map)
212-966-3988
Favorite this! (1)
Posted by Kathy YL Chan, November 15, 2011 at 1:45 PM
[Photo: Kathy YL Chan]
Red Egg has a fairly large dessert menu for a Chinese restaurant. Think fried green tea rice balls, red bean pudding, a spicy ginger crème brûlée, and more traditional sweets like sesame mochi balls and steamed milk and egg custard. All these desserts are portioned for one, with the exception of the Coconut Pudding ($8).
Bring or friend or two to share this dish; it's served in an actual coconut shell and to devour the entire thing yourself would be a bad idea. The pudding is served cold and spooned out table-side by the waiter. Supple and creamy with a texture that's best described as a cross between flan and gelatin, it's just pure and lightly sweetened coconut straight through and through. The flavor is unexpectedly intense, so make sure to cut with sips of hot tea at the table; a little goes a long way.
Red Egg
202 Centre Street ,New York, NY 10013 (map)
212-966-1123
redeggnyc.com
About the author: Originally from Honolulu, Kathy YL Chan writes A Passion For Food, where she chronicles her eats and travels adventures between Hawai'i, New York and beyond. She firmly believes that there is always room for dessert.
Favorite this! (1)
Posted by Erin Zimmer, November 9, 2011 at 12:15 PM
Besides the office, the SE staffers probably spend the most time during the workday at our beloved New York Mart, about 20 steps from our front door. (On any given day, at least one person will yell, "hey, anyone want anything at NY Mart?") This time, I came back with a styrofoam clamshell of hot food.
It's always a game of Chinese steamtable roulette when you approach these dizzying selections of roasted meats, greens, fried fish, tripe, and other mystery items. This one's not quite as overwhelming as Deluxe Market across the street, but there are easily 25 options. For $4.25 you get a choice of any three dishes plus fluffy rice.
I'm a real sucker for oily, saucy, totally bad-for-you, Chinese eggplant. This was exactly that; bright purple skins with their meaty, soft centers, ready to smother a forkful of white rice. I went with greens as the second since this was within days of our stuffing tasting (in which I consumed scary quantities of brown, butter-infused starches) as well as a shrimp and celery dish that wasn't memorable, but much improved with some chili garlic sauce hanging out in our fridge.
This lunch won't blow your mind but it's hot, cheap, and easily two, if not two and a half meals for $4.25.
New York Mart
128 Mott Street, New York NY 10013 (map)
212-680-0178
About the author: Erin is the national editor of Serious Eats. You can follow her on Twitter: @erin_zimmer
Favorite this! (0)
Posted by Erin Zimmer, November 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM
From left: Prosperity, Vanessa's. [Photographs: Jessica Leibowitz]
One of our favorite lunchtime hobbies at SEHQ is walking into one of our nearby Chinatown dumpling shops with a five-dollar bill and seeing how much we can walk out with. Usually it'll feed an office full of us with some to spare and a pocket of change. This time around we splurged and spent closer to $6 to throw in a sesame pancake, too.
Prosperity Dumpling and Vanessa's Dumpling House are pretty equidistant from our office, each with a big fanclub and extremely big cast-iron pans that fry up impressively large quantities of dumplings and sesame pancakes all day.
Have you ever seen a sesame pancake being made fresh? It comes from a much larger mama pancake that's triangle-sliced up, thicker than a scallion pancake, and filled with veggies, pork, or duck. The flatbread-like pancake is the real reason why you're eating it, and though fried (it's probably a closer relative to the doughnut than we want to admit) shouldn't be greasy.
Continue reading »
Favorite this! (2)
Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, October 27, 2011 at 8:00 PM
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Red Egg
202 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013 (Between Hester and Grand; map); redeggnyc.com
Service: Cheerful and professional
Setting: Comfortable and spacious, if a bit tacky
Must-Haves: Steamed beef rolls, Red Egg shrimp dumplings, steamed pork ribs with black olive
Cost: $2.75 to $6.50 per dim sum dish
Grade: A-
Having grown up hitting the cart-based gigantic Chinese palaces of New York and Boston's Chinatowns for my dim sum fix, I've never really considered menu-based dim sum as a viable dining option. Somehow, checking off boxes and waiting for your food to come is just not quite as fun as pointing at what you want from a stack of steamers.
But the truth of the matter is, the quality of the food you get at check-the-box-and-wait establishments is often much higher than at the cart-based operations. It's a simple matter of freshness and volume. At a normal restaurant, say, the very fine 88 Palace on East Broadway, you might get lucky and get a perfectly fresh steamed rice roll. On the other hand, you may get one that's been lurking at the bottom of the steam cart for a good couple circuits around the dining room, arriving at your table over-steamed and soggy.
Never a problem with order-as-you-go restaurants.
Pork, Shrimp, and Peanut Fun Gaw
At Red Egg on Centre Street, the game is upped even more with higher quality ingredients, fresher preparation, and more interesting flavors than at your typical dim sum restaurant.
Continue reading »
Favorite this! (11)
Posted by Ben Fishner, October 27, 2011 at 12:30 PM
[Photo: Alice Gao]
The many options near the SE office can be overwhelming, as can the pressure to try something new. So when you're hungry, it can be hard to make a decision. That was when Carey asked me if I'd be interested in eating Noodle Village's Duet Noodle Soup ($5.75), which she'd heard about through Tia Kim of Bionic Bites. My prayers were answered. I accepted.
The soup starts with a salty, fishy-porky broth. If you order delivery, Noodle Village will pack this separately, to keep from overcooking the thin ribbons of egg noodles and shrimp wontons, and to keep the crispy fish skin from going soggy, which would be a tragedy. While the wontons weren't the most exciting part--whole tiny shrimp in a thin wrapper--the crispy fish skin was a revelation: not really fishy as much as salty and crunchy, almost like a fish crouton. It's the star of the show here, retaining its crunch for a while once it hits the broth, and it makes this one of the more memorable soup noodle dishes I've had in Chinatown.
Noodle Village
13 Mott Street, New York, NY 10013 (map)
(212) 233-0788
noodlevillagenyc.com
About the author: Ben Fishner is a freelance writer currently planning his next meal. In addition to contributing to Serious Eats, he blogs at Ben Cooks Everything. Follow him on Twitter at @fozziebayer, won't you?
Favorite this! (0)
Posted by Ed Levine, October 26, 2011 at 1:00 PM
[Photos: Nick Solares]
I was wandering around Chinatown on Mott Street looking for a place to eat a seriously delicious lunch with Serious Eats writer Nick Solares when I walked past the venerable Chinatown standby, Peking Duck House. I noticed a write-up from my old friend and editor, the former New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton. Somehow the Peking Duck House had made it on to one of Sam's "Best Dishes in New York" lists. We walked in and found ourselves surrounded by a European tour group. There was one table they weren't occupied. We sat down and ordered a whole Peking Duck ($45), nothing more; we justified the price tag by telling ourselves we would certainly have leftovers to bring back.
Five minutes later a waiter brought a steamer filled with surprisingly thin and delicate pancakes, scallion ribbons, and a dish of hoisin sauce. Then the show really began.
Continue reading »
Favorite this! (1)
Posted by Carey Jones, October 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM
This time of year, our thoughts turn to pumpkin. Carving them, sure, but more to the point: eating them. And while restaurants all over town have pumpkin specials on the menu, there are a bunch of bites in Chinatown we love year-round. Check out five ways to get your pumpkin fix—from buns to congee to a whole meal in a pumpkin.
Favorite this! (0)
Posted by Carey Jones, October 24, 2011 at 1:15 PM
Photo: Alice Gao
If you're going for dim sum at Dim Sum Go Go, kick things off with the Roast Pork Buns ($2.50 for 3). It's not the porous, squishy bao you might be used to. Here, the baked buns are soft with stretchy layers, yellow and sweet, almost like the packaged "Hawaiian Bread" I loved as a kid.
The char siu inside is incredibly tasty: the right balance of sweet, salty, and porky, with tiny chunks of meat that are well-integrated but sizable enough to really taste. It's not goopy or sugary in the slightest, and the filling constitutes the better part of the package. They don't stiff you on the good stuff.
We generally share things at the Lunch Today table, but after tearing off the corner of a bun, almost every eater kept the whole thing to himself. They've got some pretty killer fried pumpkin cakes, too. But we'll get to those tomorrow.
Dim Sum Go Go
5 East Broadway, New York NY 10038 (map)
212-732-0797
Favorite this! (3)
