first food adventures in flushing
Last night, I finally journeyed out to Flushing for noteworthy Chinese food with new friends, starting the night with Qingdao at M & T 美而特 Restaurant.
We were fortunate to have Tricia Wang in our party; besides being an incredibly enthusiastic champion of certain dishes, she made sure (in Mandarin) that we ordered the freshest dishes, like the squid below (the point here is texture).
The rest of the table—
next to Tricia, the Mustachioed Man of Mystery Ben, then Kathy, who is a choreographer and professor, her husband Steve, a writer of wit, and Kevin, who coordinated the dinner—was open to every menu suggestion, almost sparring with chopsticks to try all of it as we poured TsingTao beer (it’s the yearly festival of this beer from the same area as the food).
We heard how just yesterday morning, a television crew had filmed the restaurant scrambling eggs with clams (this is a wonderful, simple dish) that will air in early September,
and the dishes kept arriving:
this pork head one became the table’s favorite,
the Ma Po Tofu that Ben ordered went almost as quickly,
I liked the sauce on the braised cabbage,
and Tricia showed us the best way to eat Qingdao pasta with special sauce (“very special,” we were told),
the noodles of shaped jelly stirred into vegetables around the sauce.
Tricia ordered one of her favorites, Chinese chives—which is a crunchy vegetable rather than an herb, (and one I plan to cook with more often, especially for the traditional eggs with Chinese chives.)
And as Ben and Kevin continued to regale us with stories, Steve seconded the idea to continue on, so Tricia led us to Imperial Palace for their sticky rice with crab.
We filmed some of our fun with the Lazy Susan on the table that I’ll link to later when it’s posted.
Extracting meat from the claws, we all agreed this was a Cantonese dish worth traveling to an outer borough for:
We were the last table at Imperial Palace, and before they started turning off the chandeliers, Kathy explained Steve’s shirt—
This is how great Friday nights go, with friends old and new, shared plates, sartorial explanations, and tellings of games, code words, and historical triumphs…
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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Saturday, August 14th, 2010, 3:38 pm * Filed in Food, restaurant, Travel. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 15th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Is that pig’s ear in the first photo? I had that in Chicago’s Chinatown for the first time a few weeks ago!
I am slowly getting up the nerve to eat more authentic Chinese food, though I won’t order without someone who knows Mandarin. I think I prefer the hot dishes to cold dishes, and when it comes to “non-American” cuts of meat, I haven’t been impressed so far. The crunch of bones and tendon still gets to me. Is this something an inexperienced eater eventually overcomes?
August 15th, 2010 at 9:50 am
Mica, I’m not sure, but it may be—it was really good. I will say that I like cartilage better in Chinese cooking than barbeque (pig’s ear sandwich is also traditional in the U.S. South). With you on the hot dishes!