A spontaneous day trip to Flushing 🥟
No cash, no cabs, just carbs.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, with just running clothes and a credit card, we take the 7 train to Main Street. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Jasmine Tieguanyin latte with black tea jelly at Song Tea
38-21 Main St, Queens, NY 11354 (Also available on Seamless)
The obligatory first stop on any trip to Flushing (aside from the Asian grocery store to stock up on snacks) is to obtain bubble tea. It’s important to secure your sweet caffeinated beverage of choice in an extra large size so you can then walk around the rest of the day with an accompaniment to all your snack consumption. There’s about a dozen boba shops within a three-block radius of Main Street; Song Tea is my favorite. Not only does it win my award for Most Creative Boba Naming, including a tea titled “Love Overtime Love Being Broke,” a whole section titled dirty(??) this place knows how to brew. I ordered a Jasmine Tieguanyin latte (iced) with black tea jelly, fully expecting even the 50% sweetness I requested to be cloying, as it usually is. But everything about it was wonderfully, beautifully Not Too Sweet. The latte tasted so clean and light and floral, without a single hint of the usual powdered creamer aftertaste. The black tea jelly was barely sweet, and full of tea flavor.
Chili oil wontons at White Bear
135-02 Roosevelt Ave, Queens, NY 11354
White Bear could be the only stop on your Flushing food adventure and it would still be an entirely worthwhile schlep on the subway. For years, my native New Yorker friends have been urging me to go -- and because I am both stubborn and somehow always out of cash, I didn’t try it until this year. And boy, have I been missing out. The chili oil wontons at White Bear 110% live up to hype. I am sorry to say (and hope she does not read this newsletter) that these wontons are even better than the ones my mother makes. For $4.50 you get a container of a dozen of the silkiest, smoothest wontons you have ever encountered in your life, with a pork filling that has no detectable bits of dreaded gristle or fat, topped with a chili oil that kicks old lady lao gan ma out of the park. Friend. The chili oil, which is perfectly nutty in its spice, has bits ofzha caiin it. Zha cai in the chili oil! A revelation. I drank the leftover chili off the bottom of the tupperware with a plastic spoon and I have no regrets, only that I do not live next door.
Egg tarts / 蛋挞 at New Flushing Bakery
135-45 Roosevelt Ave, Flushing, NY 11354
It would be a perfectly respectable choice to stop your Flushing food journey here, spending an afternoon ordering chili oil wontons until you run out of cash. But if you feel like something sweet (I always do), walk a few blocks over to New Flushing Bakery. For two dollars, you can buy the single best egg tart you’ve ever eaten in your life. But I recommend you buy half a dozen, just to be safe. I’ve always loved egg tarts in concept but rarely in execution. They’re always too watery and pale-yellow, reminiscent of a slightly sweet ji dan geng. The egg tarts at New Flushing Bakery are as golden as duck egg yolks. The custard is rich and almost liquidy on bite, nestled in a supremely flaky, buttery crust. The bakery also offers a Portuguese version, pastel de nata, which I usually prefer for its added richness, but not in this shop, where they taste oddly of coconut. Stick to the plain egg tart at New Flushing Bakery, and you cannot go wrong.
Fish & Sour Cabbage Noodle Soup (Suan Cai Yu/酸菜鱼) at Shanghai You Garden 上海豫园
135-33 40th Rd, Queens, NY 11354
By this point in your day, having consumed a large bubble tea, you’ll be facing the age-old Flushing food trip question: Where can I use the bathroom? Unfortunately, the usual answer (the Starbucks on Main Street) no longer serves us during Pandemic Times. So it’s time for a sit-down dinner. I wish I could give you a more nuanced answer to why I ended up at Shanghai You Garden, but the answer is simple: They had bathrooms and food (which is a surprisingly hard requirement to fulfill). Thankfully, they also had an enormous menu of food, including giant soup dumplings, which, to my horror, you must puncture with a straw to slurp the innards out. If you ignore some of those flashier menu choices, the shyer ones really shine. The suan cai yu (fish and sour cabbage noodle soup), was a lovely surprise. A sizable portion of soup that serves at least two, the bowl was filled with a clean, light, vinegary broth, fresh and springy wheat noodles, fillets of fish, and plenty of my favorite food, pickled mustard greens.
Shredded sauteed cabbage at Shanghai You Garden 上海豫园
135-33 40th Rd, Queens, NY 11354
At $13.95, this plainly named dish was the most expensive thing ordered in the entire day. And, because, at that point in the day, cash was indeed running low, I clenched my jaw when I saw the platter arrive, full of not bai cai, but plain ol’ Western cabbage. But I was quickly won over. Spicy and oily, with plenty of zingy green peppers, little intimidating red chilis and bits of caramelized pork belly, each bite was more addictive than the last.The leftovers, reheated and tossed with the surviving noodles from the suan cai yu above made a delicious second-day treat.
That’s all folks,
Soph
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