After Nan Xiang, I kept mumbling “I want tong yuan I want tong yuan I want tong yuan.”  This loosely translates to “I want sugar balls I want sugar balls I want sugar balls” or more accurately, in my case, I wanted mochi (rice flour dumplings) filled with black sesame paste.  It’s a treat I had occasionally while growing up – some of us were lucky enough to have parents who made them from scratch, but I’m pretty sure my mom just bought the frozen kind.  In any case, DLS was game, and Noah joined us to wander around to look for them.

***Correction: I actually intended to go get dumplings (really, wontons for the nitpicky) from White Bear, but they were closed at the late hour we went.  I remembered I wanted tong yuan and decided to go search for them. 

Our wandering around brought us to Manna Cafe, whose menu was pretty eclectic but definitely listed some approximation of what I thought I was seeking.  Noah saw “cheese & scallop dumplings” and despite my warning that he was insane, he ordered them.  Well, folks, this is what it was: wonton wrappers around some gooey “cheese” and scallops that were super chewy – the “cheese” is the same kind that, if you ever go to a Chinese buffet, and you see pretty scallop shells topped with a small scallop and some sort of “baked cheese” is in the description – that’s what it was.  It winds up tasting like creamy cooked mayo, and there are people who LOVE this stuff.  I’ve never figured out what it is nor how I actually feel about it – full disclosure, I’ve eaten those weird baked scallops many times over the years – but it isn’t cheese like any other cheese I’ve seen anywhere else.  Noah choked these down and laughed at himself. 

I noticed on the menu something called “momo ja ja” which excited me greatly.  I said “oh my god! Momo jaja is a real thing?!  My dad used to say those words to me all the time and I never knew what he was talking about.”  But then I saw the picture and a dim memory clawed its way to the surface: isn’t there coconut in that?  DLS said no, he didn’t think so.  He ordered it, saying he remembered eating it before and liking it.  And when it came, I peered suspiciously at it.  He took a few spoonfuls and said “I don’t think there’s coconut in here” – and I responded by taking his spoon, sniffing its contents and rolling my eyes hard.  “Dude, this smells like [insert really funny but incredibly offensive comment here] – I’m not eating this.”  My coconut allergy sucks, but it also enhances my senses such that I can always tell when there’s coconut in something. 

Noah chose to order a bowl of the almond milk soup with mochi dumplings, though they forgot the dumplings at first.  His was super thick, and a little odd – while tasty, I couldn’t get past the texture.  It was like… cream of wheat or something? but smoother.  Just… weird.  He seemed to like it fine, once he’d received his mochi dumplings in a clear ginger water that he used to cut the thickness of his almond milk a bit. 

Unfortunately, I really just wanted black sesame mochi dumplings in the clear ginger water, but that wasn’t on the menu.  Black sesame soup was, as were plain mochi dumplings, so I ordered these two in combination to sort of approximate what I wanted.  Again, unfortunately, this didn’t really work.  The ratio of black sesame to mochi dumpling was just off – I wanted to nibble on the edge of the mochi dumpling and have black sesame burst forth, gushing into my mouth.  I wanted the childhood memory I was trying to recreate to at least seem familiar, and this wasn’t it.  I couldn’t eat too much of this – the soup base was super thick (thicker than what I’d expect inside a filled mochi dumpling), and just weird.  I wound up pushing aside most of it, saying “DLS? I don’t want any more. You finish it.” 

Yvo says: I recognize Manna Cafe’s menu as a very specific type of restaurant – Hong Kong Cafe, which I totally adore – and might go back for other items on their menu, or even to try to order the tong yuan the way I wanted them – in a clear ginger soup, despite this choice not being on the menu.  But what we’d ordered that night – aside from DLS, who seemed happy enough with his momojaja – fell very flat for me personally, though I will say this is a matter of personal expectations and personal preferences.  I don’t think they messed up making any of our food. 
I didn’t find what I wanted, but you might…

© Feisty Foodie for The Feisty Foodie, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dessert, DLS, dumplings, mochi

Fortunately for us, the restaurant was pretty quiet since most people were smart enough to stay home. Not only was it cold, but it was raining so hard that umbrellas were rendered pretty much useless. I was happy to see that prices remained the same as last year. $26 for all you can eat hot pot and dim sum including all you can drink Budweiser. Not a bad deal at all.

While they prepared the hot pot, we all went up to the sauce station to make our own dipping sauces. You have the opportunity to make quite a unique sauce with such items as chili oil, sesame sauce, garlic and more.

They even have some fresh chopped cilantro and green onion, if that’s your thing.

CT made two different dipping sauces. One spicy and one not.

I made one sauce to start. It had chili oil and sesame in it. The chili oil had a lot of heat to it, so I used it sparingly.

We decided to get half spicy and half plain hot pot. Although we all like spicy foods, we appreciated having the mild version to cool off with otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to eat as much meat!

You simply order whatever meats, seafood and veggies you want off the menu and the waiter will bring back a HUGE plate.

This was our first seafood and veggie plate. There was fish balls, squid, cabbage, mushrooms and I think beef meatballs.

Our first meat plate had a mix of beef, lamb, and pork. They keep the meat frozen in order to easily slice it so thin. Don’t worry it cooks almost immediately in the hot pot. We never learned which meats were which, but they were all tasty and pretty good quality.

We also got an order of soup dumplings knowing full well they wouldn’t be as good as what I had at Shanghai Cafe Deluxe. They had very little broth inside and were quite sad. I should have stuck exclusively to the hot pot.

Sad innards.

Even though we already tore through a mountain of food, we decided to order one more plate. We made sure to emphasize to the waiter that we did not want a full portion. Fortunately, he obliged. There was some more beef, meatballs and tomato.

There were also some strange pork meatballs on the plate too. They had the texture of dumplings almost. Beer Boor described it as “non-descript ground pork battered and fried, more or less. Very little actual flavor.” I ate a couple anyway, haha.

The waiter cleared away a lot of the empties before we could recreate the beer pyramid. Here is our mini version. Not bad for four people.

All in all, I was pretty impressed by Shanghai Tide for hot pot. I was worried that with AYCE and AYCD for such a low price that the quality of the food would be bad, but it wasn’t. Service was pretty good for Flushing and for a table of non-Chinese. I will definitely return when I have my next hot pot craving. It’s also really close to the 7 train stop, so no complaining Manhattanites.

© TT for The Feisty Foodie, 2012. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: all you can drink, all you can eat, hot pot

DLS and I have been on quite a soup dumpling kick lately, obviously, and one of the names that comes up any time soup dumplings are mentioned is Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao.  I mean, it has “soup dumpling” (xiao long bao) in the name!  They must be good.  That and every single time I’ve tried to go, the line has been out the door, which means it must be good, right?  One Tuesday night, Hungry, Cheese, TC, Noah, DLS and I headed into Flushing to see what the hype was about (though a few of us had been before). 

An order of crispy pig ears was ordered.  Most of us found these lacking – not really crispy, just chewy bits of cartilage – which, if you’re into that, great.  We weren’t. 

The “spicy” intestines fared much better.  I enjoyed these, though I noted that they weren’t spicy by any means. 

As has become our habit with soup dumplings, DLS and I ordered fried rice cakes as well.  These were pretty good, though the plate was drowning in oil when we finished it.  

Interestingly, where every other places serves their soup dumplings in steamer trays of 8, Nan Xiang does trays of 6.  As such, every single person at our table got our own tray of dumplings.  I ordered the pork & crab ones – that is the type I’ve been ordering everywhere, so for fairness’ sake, I stuck with it – and was both pleased and distraught to see how thin the skin is.  While thin skin encourages one to taste just what’s inside, with less bready outside to interfere with the flavors of porky goodness and soup, it also makes it infinitely harder to pick up without tearing.  I admit I had trouble initially, but got the hang of it and managed to pop no more.  As mentioned, the impossibly thin skin made it easy to focus on what was inside: delicious pork, interspersed with bits of crab roe… yum.  While some people may not like the thinner skin, I enjoyed it very much and thought these were very good – definitely among the best I’d had on this soup dumpling journey…

Yvo says: While the other dishes were hit or miss, the soup dumplings were spot on very good.  We all enjoyed them, though some of us couldn’t eat a single tray without breaking every single dumpling… ahem… won’t name names… hahaha.  If you like soup dumplings, you should definitely try them at least once! 
recommended

© Feisty Foodie for The Feisty Foodie, 2012. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: DLS, dumplings, rice cakes, Shanghainese, soup dumplings

When we sat down, DLS got excited and started talking about mini fried buns.  I had no idea what he was talking about, so he ordered these – I guess they’re fried, though I wouldn’t have guessed that.  The outside texture was like it’d been glazed with sugar – slightly crunchy – but not really that sweet.  The inside was plain bread – mantou for those familiar with Chinese cuisine (a very plain baked bread that is like ‘poor food’ in China when eaten plain; it’s a great foil to very flavorful dishes, in the part of China that eats bread as its main carb).  And that little dish on the side?  Because the exterior isn’t sweet, you can sweeten it… with a little dish of sweetened condensed milk.  I ate one and was done – definitely not a dish invented for people like me.  And definitely not an appetizer in my opinion, but DLS was happy to have found this, and nommed away. 

When the soup dumplings arrived, I almost laughed out loud – look at them!  They’re so heinously ugly.  The one in the middle looks like someone got angry and just twisted off the top ‘nipple’ and didn’t care.  Really sloppy.  I shrugged though and soldiered on.  The wrapper was thick and slightly gummy, but even weirder, it was oddly dry, so they stuck to my lips as I tried to eat them – I really wanted to lick all around the outside so it would slide into my mouth more easily.  Instead, as I tried to shove the whole thing in my mouth, it just stuck to my lips and tore as it entered, which left greasy soup spilling out of the sides of my mouth.  DISLIKE.  And oh yes, the soup itself was greasy, oily, and not in that lovely luscious fatty porky way that soup dumplings should be – but rather in an unpleasant icky way.  I wasn’t too thrilled with these dumplings at all – they were pretty bad. 

For the sake of consistency, the rest of our order mimicked our order at Shanghai Cafe Deluxe.  Spicy double cooked pork, which was markedly spicier here, and the vegetables were an odd mix of cabbage, eggplant, and peppers.  I thought it was OK, but DLS didn’t like this dish much if at all. 

This time, our fried rice cakes were ordered with ‘subgum’ which basically means a mix of proteins – beef, pork, whatever.  The flavor here was better than it’d been at Shanghai Cafe Deluxe – someone who wasn’t afraid of salt (or soy sauce, really) had cooked this dish – but that person may have also absentmindedly left the rice cakes out somewhere to overcook.  They were mushy and lacked the chewy texture that Shanghai Cafe Deluxe had had, and in fact, the very characteristic of rice cakes that makes me like eating them – the chewiness – was obliterated into a gummy mess.  Blegh. 

Yvo says: More misses than hits, I don’t think I’ll be returning to Joe’s Shanghai in the near future or ever, really.  Not the one in Chinatown – I’ll do my journalistic duty and visit the one in Flushing for comparison’s sake (and to see if DLS deserves any food cred in my eyes, haha), but that’s it.  Joe’s Shanghai offered me nothing of value, and I don’t intend to return so he can laugh in my tastebud’s face again.  Dislike.
not recommended

© Feisty Foodie for The Feisty Foodie, 2012. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: DLS, dumplings, rice cakes, Shanghainese, soup dumplings

Hungry told us that we should meet at 10:30 the latest. I found this strange as most dim sum places don’t get busy until 11:30ish. Once again, I was proven wrong as the place was packed by the time we arrived. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait too long for a table and since it was dim sum, food was served immediately.

Now although I have eaten a lot of dim sum over the past couple of years, I still don’t know all of the names of the dishes, so bear with me (and help correct my mistakes). Since Hungry was our “host” and knew the best dishes, we let her sit near the aisle and pick most of the dishes.

Pork ribs. I usually skip these as they can be quite greasy and a high bone to meat ratio. I was really hungry so I had a piece. It was quite good and not too greasy. The meat also came away from the bone a lot easier than previous experiences.

Meatballs. I think these were also pork. From what I can remember, they were kind of mushy and strange.

Beef ribs. These looked very similar to the pork ribs so I was a little apprehensive, but my hunger won. The bone to meat ratio was a lot better here so I enjoyed these more than the pork ribs.

Fried taro? I skipped on this.

Har gow aka shrimp dumplings. I think of all dim sum dishes these have the group consensus of being the favorite. They were pretty good here.

Lotus leaf wrapped sticky rice. A must order everytime. They were pretty big here and full of nicely sized chunks of shrimp and pork.

Beef rice roll. I would like to know what kind of cow this came from. It was not good.

Shrimp rice roll. Much, much better than the beef version.

Bun/Dumpling Hybrid with spinach and shrimp? Yup, that’s the official name. The “shell” was very sticky and offputting. Fortunately, the innards tasted much better.

Tofu skin wrapped pork.

Turnip cake. These were good because they were very fresh and still had a good crust.

Tripe. Only Yvo and I wanted to get this. I think I have only ever eaten tripe at dim sum. It was pretty good here. Not too chewy and flavorful. Very similar texture to calamari and octopus except for the honeycomb.

Chili sauce made it even better!

Eggplant. I also passed on this as it was one of the last dishes and especially greasy looking.

Shrimp shu mai. It may have been bad timing, but we missed out on a lot of the dumplings(or maybe its always like that?) These shu mai were very good. The shrimp were plump and fresh!

All in all, Royal Seafood was a good dim sum place. Was it better than the others in Chinatown that we have been to previously? No, but it was fun to go out with friends and enjoy more dim sum. Happy Birthday TC!

© TT for The Feisty Foodie, 2012. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dim sum