Yours truly in the Nixtamal cap with about half of our party.

Special to World's Fare: Last Wednesday, I had the honor of leading the first Ambassador Dinner at Flushing’s M&T Restaurant. Our group had originally intended to sup on live octopus at Su San Seafood, but the restaurant has been closed for several weeks. Since it’s impossible to describe a new cuisine to 14 people and blog about the experience I turned to my fellow food scribe Jenny Miller for the following dispatch and enlisted Jeff Orlick and Stella Dacuma to take photos. 

--Joe DiStefano

In the early-onset darkness of a recent January evening, a group of food-minded types gathered for a journey of sorts, led by our “ambassador,” Joe DiStefano (familiar to readers as the editor of this blog). At this moment our intrepid leader was paging with concentration through a gold, padded menu. He flipped the pages then flipped them back, consulting the laminated, full-color photos on the wall, jotting notes in both Chinese and English. “Pumpkin pancakes,” he muttered. “Fiddlehead ferns.”

We were at M&T, a five-month-old Chinese restaurant in Flushing and a favorite spot of DiStefano’s, which serves food from Qingdao, the seaport city of the Shandong region. It’s a seafood-heavy cuisine, not exceedingly spicy, replete with dishes that are fried in a tempura-like batter—they go well with the Tsingtao beer the region is famous for. The restaurant is a plain and copiously lit place with six tables, and it twinkled unabashedly (as of last week, anyway) with paper Christmas decorations. 

The group began to arrive. Some knew each other already, fellow members of an informal band of ethnic-food enthusiasts known as the Jackson Heights Food Group. Several had become acquainted on Yelp, and a few others were eater-adventurers who had signed on originally to feast on hapless live seafood, a plan that was foiled when the selected outpost turned out to be inexplicably shuttered. Many lived in Queens, and a handful of others had ventured from Brooklyn or Manhattan. Most were food writers, bloggers, or self-ordained critics; no one was a vegetarian or even a picky eater.

As usual pork chop with shrimp sauce was a hit.

The pig came first—DiStefano favorite —thin-sliced pieces of pork belly marinated in fermented shrimp and stinky tofu, then deep-fried to bring out a crisp brown skin. Crunchy and heavily seasoned, it’s a dish New Yorkers will love, bringing to mind—with its bolt of flavor and silky under-texture–the seasoning-heavy fried chicken that has popped up ubiquitously around town.

Pig head and cucumber: cool garlicky and crunchy.

“Pork’s head meat with cucumber” tastes more exotic to Western palates. The cool dish, almost a salad, has fermented undertones from the cucumber that a persnickety eater might dismiss as delicately rotten. The meat is shredded (no snouts in sight), and the small chunks cling wetly to the vegetable.

Nan gua bing, or “pumpkin pancakes” look nothing at all like flapjacks.

Promised “pumpkin pancakes” turned out to be patties—fried disks with a soft inside, playing the potato role in our meal with their barely adulterated, sweet starchiness. It would end up being a heavily fried meal, and several dishes circulated to offset this. Peanuts with celery was cold and chunky, bringing to mind the mix of water chestnuts and other canned crunchy bits that populates Americanized Cantonese cooking; more exciting were the complimentary plates of pickled lotus-root rounds, dappled with generous slivers of ginger, which served to wet the mouth and cleanse the palate.

M&T’s crunchy fried sea shrimp showered with chilies and Sichuan peppercorns.

“Sea shrimp with chili” proved a table favorite: head-on prawns, coated with chili and garnished with several ounces of deep and licoricey Sichuan peppercorns. The “Qingdao special course” incorporated the fiddlehead ferns—long, narrow black bits with a similar texture to seaweed—stir-fried with bean sprouts, bamboo, pork, and other julienned vegetables.

My guests kept referring to the Laosan ginseng with salt and pepper as calamari.

Next, more fried food: “Laosan ginseng with salt & pepper,” a winner of a dish that lived up to its salty name, with the inner crunch and puffy shell of good tempura; the “fish stick” turned out to be generous hunks of expertly deep-fried white fish. 

Clambake chicken turned out to be a delicately flavored soup.

Names are somewhat haphazardly translated at M&T and can elude even the most educated guessing: Who knew clambake chicken would be a simple chicken-and-clam soup? Two large bowls of it were presented to the perplexed group—even our ambassador had been thrown off.  But at M&T, a spot whose spelled-out name Mei Er Te translates to “beautiful and extraordinary,” it’s best not to fret too much over taxonomy and nomenclature; you’ll be amply rewarded if you simply focus on eating.

M&T Restaurant, 44-09 Kissena Blvd., Flushing, 718-539-4100

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