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Chinatown Elegy
Just as Fuzhou restaurants had become so numerous, especially along East Broadway, that there seemed no way to distinguish them; and just as the giant Hong Kong banquet and dim sum palaces had slunk off like dinosaurs looking for a place to die; and just as the Malaysian restaurants had stopped multiplying like the Shanghai […]
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Dumpling Magic
Four years ago Chinatown’s first dumpling stall appeared on Allen Street. At Fried Dumpling, a dollar got you five pork-and-chive pot stickers, four fluffy pork buns, or a bowl of hot-and-sour soup—you could dine splendidly for two bucks. Others soon followed, and the current census stands at four. While most Chinese eateries serve food from […]
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Mo’ Better Pho
A decade ago, Vietnamese cafés were springing up everywhere in Manhattan’s Chinatown, offering over-rice meals cheaper than anyone else’s. The delicate charcoal-grilled pork chops, lemongrass chicken, and steaming bowls of pho became an obsession with many diners, and the bright-tasting palate of flavors—which included fresh mint, cilantro, Asian basil, and the vinegary fish sauce called […]
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Goodbye Ruby Foo’s
Like a Fu Manchu movie crossed with a small upstate university’s art collection, Ruby Foo’s flaunts its Asian artifacts. Make your way up the sweeping stairway and you’ll encounter snarling temple dogs, fur-trimmed skullcaps, serpentine bronze candlesticks, stands of plastic bamboo, and an alabaster Buddha, his head inclined heavenward in a cosmic belly laugh. He’s […]
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The Players
Bisected by an open kitchen, the long dining room is pleasantly underdecorated—the red-faced Laughing Cow glued to one wall, a few shelves of old glassware up near the tin ceiling, and a blue mural at the end of the room showing three homburged peasants seated at a table while a standing figure watches, smoking a […]