Flushing nosh: Eyili Kabab King and Shen Jing

After dim sum I went to the Flushing Library to finish up a proofreading project, but despite all I had just eaten I felt like I had to arm myself with a snack for later (shh, don't tell the librarian). I popped my head into the newly opened Roosevelt Food Court to see if there was something I could pick up and spotted the baked samsas at Eyili Kabab King.

I'd had a samsa before (at Cafe Kashkar in Brighton Beach), but this one was so much better. It was given to me piping hot, and the outer shell was flaky and a little crunchy on the bottom. The lamb filling was fragrant with spices and sweet with a mess of slow-cooked onions. At a dollar each, the samsa was a really good value. But be warned, the lamb meat is definitely funky, so anyone adverse to gaminess should probably steer clear…I do love that funkiness though.

After the library closed, I called up MH to see if she wanted to meet me for dinner and ended up picking up some items from Shen Jing to bring over to her apartment instead. The above steamed buns were both vegetarian: one with mustard greens and thin rice noodles, and the other with cabbage and egg. Both were huge, packed with filling, and tasty.

I also got a sweet bing filled with a maltose and sesame paste, which tasted even better when heated up later in a pan. The outsides got crisp while the sugary filling melted and got gooey, and for a non-sugar fiend like me, the level of sweetness was just right.

With each of these items hovering around a dollar, this snack-ish stuff is a bargain. There's nothing like Flushing for eating cheaply and well.

Sauce, basil, and no cheese: Jianetto's Pizza Truck

For four girls meeting up for lunch in midtown Manhattan, pizza off a truck was the order of the day. XJS had less than an hour to get back to her office, and JL wanted to try Jianetto's after reading the review on Midtown Lunch.

I met JL at the small plaza in front of the truck, and somehow she was already bearing a full pie.

As well as an order of Sicilian rice balls, broken up and covered in sauce…

…which came with garlic knots. Once XJS arrived and MH secured us drinks, it didn't take long for the four of us to dig in.

Here's my slice. Doesn't look too remarkable, does it? Unfortunately, its taste matched its appearance. From reading the review, I knew not to expect much cheese (if at all), but I didn't expect the pizza to taste so much like a cheap breadstick spread with sweet marinara. I didn't mind the cheese-lessness and the whole leaves of basil were a nice touch, but I wanted dough with more character beneath that sauce. As for the rice balls and garlic knots, they were fine, but not mind-blowing. With limited time in one of the best cities to eat, I was underwhelmed by the experience, and so was JL.

At least it was fast….

I heart outdoor food: Brooklyn Flea and New Amsterdam Market

I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't the antiques, the jewelry, or the clothing that drew me to Brooklyn Flea: it was the food. Specifically, the wares of the vendors from Red Hook that had sought refuge amongst the hipsters and bargain-hunters.

One Sunday I gathered up a handful of friends and we set out from Astoria to Fort Greene. After walking from the subway and sweating all over the place, one of the first things I did once I reached the flea market was make a beeline to water myself with a beverage. The Red Hook vendors didn't have the cashew fruit drink that I had loved so much last year, but they did have watermelon juice. Packed with small chunks of the fruit itself, the icy juice wasn't very sweet but was still the perfect antidote to the overwhelming heat.

The seven of us spread out onto different lines, acquiring various food items for the group. AL and XJS picked out pupusas, one filled with loroco flower and cheese, and another that I can't remember now. The fat cornmeal patties were rustic, piping hot, and totally tasty—awesome.

One with chicken, and one with beef: huaraches! Each necessitating two hands and at least several mouths in order to consume. Folding those suckers in half and biting into them sideways seemed to be the only way we could pull it off. Stabbing at them with forks worked, too.

After eating we all poked around the market for a while. DL picked up this rhubarb tart from Whimsy & Spice, who were also giving out samples of their excellent spiced shortbread cookies. I tried the honey lavender, the brown sugar gingerspice, and the chocolate orange cardamom, and all were really good.

And then it started to rain. Like mad!

We sought shelter on the steps of a building, under some scaffolding, while trying to figure out where to head next.

It seemed the only sensible thing to do was to head towards more food. So we hopped on a train to New Amsterdam Market by South Street Seaport (after rejecting the Unfancy Food Show as too complicated to get to). The rain had stopped by the time we came out of the station, but the market was almost closed.

Nonetheless there were plenty of treats to be had, both for sampling and for purchasing alike. I was too full to try much though, so I just bought this cup of cold-brewed iced coffee (black, please) at the New York Coffee Society booth. After hanging out for a while (and peeping Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls, anyone else think they just look like something sprung a leak?) we all parted ways, since it looked like it was about to rain again as well.

Just another day of food-centric frolicking in New York City….

Sugar and spice and everything nice: Dessert Truck

I'd already eaten a whole plate of ho-hum pad see-ew for dinner at Montien Thai with TL, ID, and ID's friend J, but as we headed to the train we ran into the famed Dessert Truck and I stopped dead. I had read an entire post about all of the truck's various offerings not long before, and there was no way I was passing this one by.

I opted for the goat cheese cheesecake, "topped with fresh blackberries, rosemary caramel, and a pistachio crisp," as well as their acclaimed chocolate bread pudding. I wasn't crazy though…I took them both back to my apartment before digging in with MH, giving myself time to digest before padding my dinner with sweets.

I'm glad I waited. Not having a sweet tooth, there was no way I could have finished either one by myself, though both were quite good. Goat cheese haters wouldn't have been able to overlook the unmistakable goaty tang in the cheesecake, but luckily, I'm a fan. And I enjoyed the pool of rosemary honey around the cheesecake, which added a surprising herbal note.

The sweetness of the honey did get sickly after a while though, and with the chocolate bread pudding I didn't fare any better. Even MH, who can inhale a pint of ice cream in about ten minutes, ate a spoonful and paused before commenting, "Oh, that's…thick." She stopped eating shortly after.

This isn't to say that either of them were bad, just that they were both much too sweet. I could clearly taste the quality of ingredients, and I'm impressed that desserts at this level are being offered from a truck. For most other folks this mobile dessert vendor is probably a dream, but for me, I'm good with stopping at what I've tried.

Peanut Butter Truck or Treat

I like cookies, I like peanut butter, and I like treats. This peanut butter cookie from the Treats Truck pretty much fit all my happy requirements. Not quite as melt-in-your-mouth as the amazing peanut butter cookie from City Bakery, but delightful in its own sugar-coma kind of way. I could just as soon do without the extra-sweet peanut butter filling though, and munch away on the slightly salty cookies on their own.

Day-long Chinese feasting, part 1: Sunset Park and Pacificana

For the longest time the two big Asian hot spots in my mind were lower Manhattan and Flushing, Queens. Between those two areas were communities of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese businesses in K-town, Elmhurst, or on St. Marks Place that I dropped in on (still do), but it wasn't until recently that I began to pay attention to Sunset Park.

The layout of New York City's Brooklyn Chinatown is funny in that most of the shops and restaurants run along Eighth Avenue in one long strip. According to some, owners all wanted their businesses on this street because in Chinese culture the number eight—which sounds like fa, meaning fortune—is considered good luck.

Several weeks ago I made plans with friends to chill in this thriving Chinatown for an afternoon. Walking around before meeting them, I dropped by the above stand and picked up two buns for later, one pork and one vegetable. When I had them the next day I found the pork filling skimpy and the cabbage-heavy filling muddled and oily, but at fifty cents each, either would still not be a bad snack.

At the glitzy and massive Hong-Kong style Pacificana—whose take on General Tso's chicken I had sampled at the Village Voice's Choice Eats event back in March—I met up with MB and BH for dim sum. Above: shrimp dumplings, shao mai, and black bean short ribs.


Glistening baked roast pork buns; shrimp balls covered in fried noodles; pan-fried taro cake; rice noodles with dried shrimp and scallions. Thumbs up.


A delicious scallion pancake that turned out to be made with rice flour, giving it the crispy, chewy consistency of fried mochi; noodle-wrapped crullers; rice steamed in lotus-leaf; beef rice-noodle roll; and sesame balls filled with lotus seed paste. We also got a plate of Chinese broccoli, you know, to be "healthy."

Word to the wise: dim sum is best done with four or more, especially when you want to sample a variety of items. It was impossible for the three of us to finish everything.

After leaving Pacificana we walked around for a while, taking in the scene. I was fairly miserable with fullness—and then it hit me that in just four or five hours I would be attending a full Chinese banquet in honor of MH's graduation. I was a dead woman.

Carb me up: Saigon Bánh Mì So 1, Deluxe Food Market

After Brighton Beach, I stopped off in Chinatown to pick up some groceries, and just as I stepped out of the station I got a text from MH: "Where are you? Are you coming home for dinner?" She had been stuck in the apartment all day studying for her finals, and knowing she had looked for bánh mì just the week before to no avail, I decided to bring a few back to ease her pain.

The first time I ever tried a bánh mì, almost a decade ago, it was from Viet-Nam Bánh Mì So 1. I was enchanted after my first bite: the combination of cucumber, sweet marinated pork, pâté, pickled carrots, sriracha, and slices of pork roll between crisp French bread was like nothing I'd ever tasted before, and I considered the sandwich one of my greatest finds. Viet-Nam Bánh Mì So 1 has therefore always held a special place in my memory, but it had been years since I'd gotten one from here.

Now the place is called Saigon Bánh Mì So 1, but as far as I could tell nothing else had changed...aside from the sandwiches, that is. The two I brought back to my apartment (one house special, one pâté) were nothing special: coarsely prepared ingredients layered between a load of dry, hard bread. I suppose they could have always been this underwhelming and only my inexperience had made them delicious—I have eaten a number of other bánh mì since—but still, they were disappointing.

Luckily there were other good things to be had: the mai fun I got from a random street vendor, who spooned a thin, oily peanut sauce over the pile of stir-fried rice noodles before closing the lid, and nuòmǐ fan from Deluxe Food Market, glutinous rice prepared with sweet, fatty Chinese sausage, roast pork, dried shrimp, shiitake mushrooms, and cilantro. I only had several bites of each, considering everything else I had eaten that day, but both were quite delicious.

Unphotogenic Woodside tamale

On my way to dinner at Sripraphai, I spotted this tamale vendor. Having just gotten tamales from the woman at 36th Ave a week or so earlier, I wanted to see how this one compared.

The next day the mole and pork tamale I got was fine, but it was less moist and flavorful than the ones the 36th Ave woman sells. This one also taught me something else: mole tamales are terribly unphotogenic. You don't even want to see the pictures I deleted.

King of Falafel & Shwarma: "yahhh baby who want it"

I've been living in the same apartment in Astoria since 2005, and for the past three years, I've walked by these guys and inhaled the rich, smoky fragrance of grilling meat but never stopped to get food from them.

It takes someone new to shake things up, I guess. When MH met me at the train station one afternoon after work, she declared that she was hungry and we decided to make a stop.

The King of Falafel & Shwarma has their menu tied to the railing behind their cart, with amusing come-ons such as "So are you really hungry today so let the big man feed you with his special all in one plate over Salad and rice if u want yahhh baby who want it" and "The best chicken and rice in town try it..... did you say yummmmmmey yes you did." They're really friendly, too; as we waited on line I listened to them joke with one customer after another. There seemed to be a lot of regulars.

MH and I got the beef kefta platter on rice pilaf and the chicken platter on yellow rice, topping both with hot sauce and white sauce. Each came with lots of random accoutrements, including iceberg lettuce, tomato wedges, spiced raw onions, a piece of falafel, and a bright pink root vegetable that neither of us had encountered before (something like a hard, raw turnip; anyone know what this was? Uh, it wasn't tasty).

Overall both were decent, but unfortunately I have to disagree with their declaration that they have the best chicken and rice platter in town. Both of their meats were on the dry side, and while I liked the rice pilaf, the yellow rice was standard (read: boring). The falafel they threw in there was a nice touch though.

My heart still belongs to Sammy's Halal in Jackson Heights, which is the only street meat I can envision myself wanting to eat regularly. Winner of the 2006 Vendy Awards, Sammy's juicy, flavorful chicken, perfectly spiced lamb chunks, fragrant basmati rice, cool and creamy white sauce, and smoky hot red sauce has never failed to make me happy. Though I haven't tried the chicken and rice on 53rd Street, I'm not convinced that it would be any better; I've heard the rice is super greasy there, which is a turn-off. I am simply not into "living the lifestyle," I suppose.