Eating Asian in Flushing Mall's food court

Flushing Mall isn't a mall in the conventional sense, as in a place filled with popular retail, Auntie Anne's "pretzels," and brand-name clothing. If anything, it's kind of dinky and more like an indoor flea market, with random booths selling knockoff dvds and imported accessories and clothing from Asia. There's a damn cool comb store, where hand-crafted wooden and horn combs boasting well-being properties are on display, but like Roboppy, the main draw for me is their food court.


Flushing Mall's food court features numerous stalls, all of them Asian. There are hand-pulled noodles and handmade dumplings, Taiwanese and Japanese pastries and snacks, shaved ice and bubble tea, and lots of "over rice" offerings. There used to be a conveyor-belt sushi area and shabu-shabu, but when I went with TL before his dentist appointment, both of those seemed to be gone.

It always takes me a while to decide when I'm in there, because everything looks so darn good. But between the two of us we settled on noodles with Taiwanese meat sauce, egg pancake (love those egg pancakes), grilled corn painted with sha-cha sauce, and pork dumplings doused with soy sauce, chili oil, and a heaping pile of raw chopped garlic. Um, because we were aiming for complete love from TL's dentist.


We also ordered two pastries, one filled with shreds of savory turnip and the other filled with a mysterious combination of scallions, lard, and maybe a bit of pork. Both had nice and flaky crusts and great flavor.

So Flushing Mall is a great place to get food, not such a good place to go shopping. But if you're still curious about the place, these two photos, taken by TL in the men's room, should explain everything you need to know:


I mean…what can you do but give love to a place that has specific instructions on where you can and cannot vomit?