About a mile from Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens is New York’s “other” Chinatown. Like many people, I’d only been to the Chinatown in Manhattan — the one where Chinese residents co-exist with hungry NY diners and tourists buying knock-off Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. What I didn’t realize was that to feel as though you’ve been transported to China and dropped in downtown Beijing, you have to go to Flushing. This is the real deal Chinatown; it alternately amazed, delighted and bewildered me.
(pic courtesy of Gothamist.com)
My parents were in town for the weekend; yesterday we trekked over to Flushing, making a few wrong turns along the way. Since I was with parental company I didn’t get into full blogging mode; I only took a couple of pics and didn’t pay attention to the names of the restaurants (For a well-written and comprehensive look at the restaurants, give the recent New York Times article a read).
Here are a few Chinatown impressions from a Flushing newbie:
1. The main drag on Main St. is shockingly dense with stores and people. My mom grew up in Flushing and she said this Chinatown didn’t even exist when she was a kid — in the last few decades a massive influx of Asian immigrants has changed the face of Flushing, establishing restaurants and shops in what used to be a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
2. My family’s Chinese, my parents speak Mandarin, and even they felt like visitors in a foreign country. There are no vendors hawking knock-off designer products to eager tourists. We saw very few non-Chinese people, and the stores don’t even bother labeling products in English. Just a completely different feel from Manhattan’s Chinatown.
3. The supermarkets are a trip — a cacophony of noise and crazy looking items that’ll have you scratching your head and closely inspecting everything while you wonder, “What IS that?” In this pic a guy’s pointing to some sort of shrimp-like animal, only they looked more like giant centipedes and were flopping around in the barrel.
Does anyone know what these are? Seriously, I have no idea. Are they fish? Mutant tadpoles?
Mom felt bad for the frogs. ”What a way to spend your last few hours,” she said sympathetically.
Barrels of pickled vegetables.
4. The NY Times article mentions the Golden Mall, which is maybe not the “mall” you’d expect. It’s a collection of food stalls and tables in a cramped basement setting with no air conditioning. The food looked authentic and amazing, but mom was turned off by the heat (and the questionable sanitary conditions). When dad suggested going back to sample the food, she asked, “And when the three of us get sick, who’s going to drive us home?”
5. If you’re looking for grab-and-go food on the cheap, you can find something enticing every five feet. At this street stall, we watched the servers slinging noodles, buns and dumplings with efficient ferocity.
We picked up scallion pancakes and pork dumplings (four for $1.25- what a deal). The dumplings were outstanding — soup dumplings on steroids that exploded with flavorful, juicy pork.
This light sponge cake from a Main St. bakery had bits of fresh cantaloupe and honeydew inside. Oh, and we also ate fresh lychees later on.
6. We made the mistake of visiting Flushing after having eaten lunch — none of us had our full appetites going. My advice is to go on an empty stomach so you can sample and graze and take advantage of the staggering array of food options. This is Chinese food at its most authentic and vibrant — probably as close to Beijing as you can get without taking a 14 hour flight.
So that’s a brief look at Flushing’s Chinatown— this first visit was just a warmup; now I know what to expect. Next time I’m going in hungry and armed with a plan of attack. Maybe I’ll even try the Golden Mall (shhh, don’t tell mom).
How was your Labor Day weekend? What’d you eat?