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FEASTING ON FLUSHING
Two chefs eat their way from Chengdu to Seoul
without ever leaving the borough
Written by Joe DiStefano • Photography by Michael Scott Berman
FLUSHING - Flushing was founded in 1645 as the first permanent Dutch settlement in the borough, named after Vlissingen, a city in the Netherlands. But these days, it’s home to New York City’s most ethnically diverse and more affluent Chinatown. Main Street, the neighborhood’s principal thoroughfare, is lined with Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese businesses and decorated street to sky with multicolored signs written in every imaginable Asian language. The neighborhood is also the most religiously diverse community in the country, boasting no fewer than 200 houses of worship. For those who pray for a good meal, it might as well be Mecca.
Ascending out of the number 7 train terminus at Main Street/Flushing is like stepping into another world, truly. In every direction, there are Asian bakeries selling bubble tea and curried pork puffs, TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) apothecaries and street vendors hawking everything from homemade Peking duck to dollar-a-serving Xinjiang lamb barbecue. One of my favorite Flushing fixtures is the distinguished elderly gentleman holding court outside Chao Zhou Restaurant on the corner of Main and 41st Avenue with his grey-feathered companion, scarcely larger than a plum and nestled in an ornate cage adorned with a sign reading “fortune telling bird.” Any meal in Flushing can potentially be a unique once-in-a-lifetime experience. But a few weeks ago, I was offered the opportunity to accompany two of the world’s most respected chefs on a discovery tour of the neighborhood. Good fortune, indeed.
My two companions were Anthony Bourdain, the somewhat-reformed bad-boy host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations, and his buddy of nine years Eric Ripert, who has stood at the helm of Manhattan’s three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin since 1994. Having chronicled his 28-year career as a working chef in the book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Bourdain has shelved his chef ’s whites to wander the world in search of interesting culinary experiences. Ripert, on the other hand, is one of the world’s seafood masters, having led Le Bernardin to such titles as “The Best Restaurant in New York City” (New York magazine) and “The Best Restaurant in America” (GQ). I knew exactly where to take these two.
First stop: the Golden Shopping Mall. Although part of the awning reads “Golden Supermarket,” this two-story mazelike food court is nothing like your average Stop ’n’ Shop. With few items over $10, the Golden Shopping Mall offers a seemingly endless menu of regional Chinese specialties, including flatbreads and charcuterie from Tianjin; noodles and fish balls from Fujian; the Silk Road–influenced, lamb-based fare of Xi’an; fiery noodles and soups from Sichuan; and hand-pulled noodles from Lanzhou. Even though English signage has become more prevalent since it was written up in the New York Times last summer, the Golden Shopping Mall remains intimidating and downright foreign to most first-time visitors. It is often hot, crowded and noisy, and almost everyone is speaking Mandarin or some other Chinese dialect. “It’s like stepping into Chung King Palace in Hong Kong,” said Bourdain. “A few steps down and you’re not in America.”
And so began our descent into the Golden Shopping Mall. “Ah, I can smell the anise,” Ripert correctly noted as we walked down the stairs. The scent was wafting from a Sichuan food stall just at the base of the stairway, released in the steam of a bubbling hot pot. We settled in front of Xie’s Home Cooking, or Xie Jia Tsai, where Mr. Xie, who hails from the northeastern port of Tianjin, serves such specialties as freshly made dumplings (jiao zi), calzone-shaped chive pies (jia cai he zi), potato slaw with hot peppers (tu dou), pig’s feet (chu jiao) and head cheese (rao dong). Xie thinly sliced a few morsels of the head cheese and dished up a platter of potato slaw. With the thwack, thwack, thwack of hand-pulled noodles slamming against a pastry board behind us, we tucked into this distinctly Chinese meat-and-potatoes meal.
“I am amazed,” remarked Ripert of the cool, crunchy, slightly sweet potato slaw. “In France, you never eat potatoes raw.” In fact, these are blanched just long enough to be pliable but still maintain their crunchiness. After the charcuterie, our appetites turned southward to Chengdu Heavenly Plenty Snacks, or Cheng Du Tian Fu Xiao Shi. The cooks here are from Chengdu, Sichuan’s provincial capital, and specialize in such fiery Sichuan fare as hot pot (ma la tan); noodles with ground beef, chili and Sichuan peppercorn (dan dan mian); and “husband-and-wife” offal slices (fu qi fei pian), a mixture of beef tendon, tripe and tongue awash in a spicy mouth-numbing sauce enhanced by cilantro, Chinese celery and peanuts. We selected Heaven Chicken, or tian fu ji, a dish they often run out of by the evening. The poached chicken had an incredibly soft, almost melting texture, no doubt due to the Chinese technique of alternating poaching with rapid chilling.
It was dressed with chili oil, garlic, ginger and green onion, and was incredibly spicy. “Now you’re talking my language,” said Bourdain. Next we turned our chopsticks toward Xi’an Famous Foods, where my friend Lao Liang was busy organizing his stall for the lunchtime rush. His stall is one of the most approachable for a newbie because it offers a picture menu with English translations and Lao speaks English quite well. He’s originally from Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in the northwest of China, and one of its oldest cities. Xi’an is on the eastern end of the fabled Silk Road, the complex network of trade routes that stretched throughout Central Asia and into the Middle East, Mediterranean and down into Africa during the first century BC. As a result, Xi’an cuisine tends to use a lot of cumin and lamb. Lao’s specialties include zi ran chao yang rou jia mo, a crisp flatbread filled with lamb seasoned with cumin and hot pepper and topped with pickled jalapeños; “tiger vegetables,” or lao huo zai, a bracing salad of cilantro, jalapeños and green onions; stewed veal neck, or yiang xie zi; and a handmade noodle dish known as biang biang mian, so named for the sound the dough makes when it’s being worked.
Bourdain had been here before, and Lao, who keeps a signed photo of the celebrity chef above his register, was thrilled at his return. “You’re gonna love this,” Bourdain said to Ripert, and asked Lao for some liang pi, or cold skin noodles, which happens to be one of the most popular items. It’s so often requested, in fact, that Lao frequently answers to the nickname Liang Pi. At any hour of the day you will find someone here digging into this cool mélange of chewy wheat starch noodles and gluten blocks tossed with julienned cucumbers, bean sprouts, cilantro and a wonderful sauce made from chili oil, garlic, sesame paste and other “secret” ingredients. (I have tried on numerous occasions to get Lao to reveal the sauce ingredients, but whenever I ask, he smiles wryly. “The recipe’s from my grandfather’s grandfather,” he says, tapping his temple as if to indicate the recipe’s in his head. “Nearly 3 centuries old. I’ll never tell.”) After the noodles, we stretched our legs and wandered among the stalls a bit more, eager to fill our bellies to the brim, but knowing we had another, even more adventurous spot in store. “I’m overwhelmed,” said Bourdain, slowly climbing the Golden Shopping Mall steps with Ripert out into the midday sunshine. “Whenever I come here, I always feel a sense of frustration. There’s not enough time to explore all the food in this building, much less Queens.” We headed east along Northern Boulevard, toward our final destination, Su San Seafood, or so the awning reads. In fact, this place, known primarily to discriminating Korean seafood lovers and a few intrepid food bloggers, has an especially significant second name: Noryangjin, which is Seoul’s largest seafood market, world-famous for being the principal Asian wholesaler of ultrafresh and exotic sea creatures. The main course awaiting us: live octopus, which I’d previewed just days before in a trial run. Live, as in “still moving.” Talk about adventure.
Meeting us at the restaurant was Clara Park, who drove up from Philadelphia that morning. Park is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education and former line cook for the Manhattan restaurant Momofoku Ko who now works as a food consultant in various capacities. She’s also first-generation Korean-American, and has traveled to Korea in the company of her parents several times. Without her, we would have been lost. No one at Su San speaks English, and the menu, though it does contain photos, is filled with so many exotic creatures like sea squirt (mung geh), abalone (juhn bohk) and sea cucumber (heh sahm) that it would be nearly impossible for a novice to navigate successfully. We were deep in Flushing, so deep that we needed a translator from Philadelphia.
Park spoke to the waitresses in rapid-fire, no-nonsense Korean, gesticulating toward the group and pointing at the menu, and a flurry of activity ensued. She asked for platters of fresh-from-the-tanks fluke, assorted sashimi and of course, live seafood. But before this bounty of maritime riches arrived, a toast of soju, the traditional vodka-like Korean rice liquor, was in order. In keeping with Korean custom, Park, the youngest of our group, poured for us. “Korea was one of only two countries where everybody drank me under the table…regardless of body weight, size or age,” said Bourdain said as he drained his shot. “The other was Russia.”
Our waitress brought out a staggering array of banchan, the free dishes that precede and accompany all Korean meals. I’d be lying if I said each was better than the next. In fact, they were all outstanding, and vastly different from the typical items one gets in Manhattan. There were sautéed oyster mushrooms, fried breaded whitefish, steamed kobucha squash, shrimp tempura, corn gratin, steamed periwinkle snails (gohl bheng gee) and frozen strips of baby squid (han chi hwe) seasoned with vinegared hot pepper paste (cho goh chu jhang). The squid slices started off crunchy then melted slowly, tasting of the sea, made spicy.
The first wave of seafood arrived, accompanied by more banchan, including delicious cooked baby octopi (sae bal nakji), a tease for the main event. “These are cute,” Bourdain said, popping a tiny cephalopod into his mouth. Among the additional banchan was steamed egg custard (gye ran jjim), which proved quite soothing to Ripert when he overdosed on raw green hot peppers. There was also a fusion take on pajeon, the traditional Korean pancake. This one was made from ground “green vegetables” and topped with cheese. It was a first, which I shall forever think of as pajeon verde con queso.
Bourdain, Ripert and I gamely dug into the first platter, which included the sea squirt, sea cucumber, raw lobster and abalone. I could take or leave the sea cucumber, which had a slimy texture and cartilaginous crunch. The bright orange lobes of sea squirt were far more interesting. They were the most oceanic things I’ve ever tasted, with so much iodine that my palate was left pleasantly anesthetized, as if the sea creature had been spritzed with clove oil. We couldn’t stop eating them.
As we settled into the rhythm of the meal, we remained mindful of the course to come. Behind us, Mr. Chung, the sushi chef, fished through various seafood tanks for the liveliest octopi, under the watchful gaze of owner Theresa Kwak. The conversation turned to the ethics of killing animals for food. Ripert, a practicing Buddhist, admitted to being a full-fledged hypocrite. “I’m an omnivore— I eat everything,” he exclaimed, plucking a periwinkle from its shell. “But I am not the killer.” He laughed, and Bourdain agreed. Not long after he uttered those words, a platter descended upon the table. Upon it was a mass of 2-inch-long sections of still squirming octopus tentacles. Ripert’s eyes grew wide and he looked to me expectantly. I looked to Bourdain, who deftly wrangled a tentacle with his chopsticks and dipped it into a mixture of salt and sesame oil, a combination said to prevent the tentacles from suctioning to the inside of one’s mouth. For a moment it escaped his grasp, but he grabbed it with his chopsticks and kept it from wriggling across the table.
“Come to papa,” he said, before devouring it, an omnivorous smile crossing his face. Then it was Ripert’s turn. Bourdain cackled with glee as the French seafood expert struggled to get hold of the tentacle. The look that crossed Ripert’s face upon placing it in his mouth was a combination of childlike wonder mixed with horror and utmost urgency.
The tentacles, it seemed, clung to the inside of Ripert’s cheek, and he was struggling to release their grasp as he chewed. I also ate the fish that fights back. Although nothing beats discovering a new food and a new custom, the truth is I’d rather take my chances with fugu than something that attaches itself to the inside of my mouth as I try to eat it. Still, it’s something every adventurous eater should try at least once, mainly because it’s a lot of fun.
“It’s a daring food that people eat when they’re out drinking,” explains my friend Joe McPherson, who lives in South Korea and writes for the Korea Times and Seoul Magazine. “Koreans love it for the same reason Americans do: It’s fun and scary.” Ripert said it best: “There are better ways to eat octopus, better ways to make it taste good. But you don’t really have time to think about the flavor— it’s an experiment!”
As we were leaving, a Korean family with a toddler asked Bourdain to pose for a photo. He gladly propped the girl on his knee. Leaving Bourdain to his fans, Ripert and I walked out of the restaurant toward a waiting car. “They love him in Asia,” Ripert said of his friend. “He’s like Spider-Man.” I couldn’t help but smile at the comparison to one of Queens’ most famous homegrown celebrities.
WHAT TO EAT AT THE GOLDEN SHOPPING MALL:
XIE’S HOME COOKING
Freshly made dumplings (jiao zi)
Calzone-shaped chive pies (jia cai he zi)
Potato slaw with hot peppers (tu dou)
Pig’s feet (chu jiao)
Head cheese (rao dong)
XI’AN FAMOUS FOODS
Lamb sandwiches (zi ran chao yang rou jia mo)
Tiger Vegetables (lao huo zai)
Stewed veal neck (yiang xie zi)
Cold skin noodles (liang pi)
CHENGDU HEAVENLY PLENTY SNACKS
Hot Pot (ma la tan)
Noodles with ground beef, chili and Sichuan peppercorn (dan dan mian)
“Husband-and-wife” offal slices (fu qi fei pian)
Heaven Chicken (tian fu ji)
Golden Shopping Mall, 41-28 Main St., Flushing
Su San Seafood, 40-30 149th Pl., Flushing, 718-460-5414
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My boyfriend and I will be blogging abt our trip here, along with a link to your article at 
!
I am a big fan of your column (I usually read on Serious Eats). Thanks for the tips on Golden Shopping Mall, I have tried a couple of the stalls based on some of your previous articles. I would also like to recommend one of my favorite Taiwanese restaurants for you to try. ( If you aren't adverse to eating with a complete stranger, I would gladly play host for such an excursion.) The restaurant is on Main St. by the LIE, the name is Main St. Taiwanese Gourmet. If you venture by yourself, please try these 3 dishes. bamboo boat chicken (quite sure this is not the name on the menu, in chinese it sound like tsu-tong ji), tofu casserole (awesome sauce), and Salt and Pepper Pork Chops. I have no ulterior motive other than I would like to read about my favorite restaurant in your column... I am quite sure that you will be impressed. Thanks again for the insights and if you do take me up on the offer, email me at mojolin@aol.com
James Lin