Jackson Heights Life

Flushing Chinatown is recognized as the best New York City neighborhood for "tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China."  It's a lot more than dim sum!

The New York Times
Let the Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: July 30, 2008

SEATED at a rickety table, saltshaker poised above a bowl of delicate chicken-and-ginseng soup, the young Taiwanese woman considered a question: why not use soy sauce?

“Soy sauce is so American,” she said finally. “It makes everything taste the same.”

Everything tastes different in Flushing, Queens, the best neighborhood in New York for tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China. The dumplings are juicier here, the noodles springier, the butter cookies flavored with a bit of salty green seaweed, as a cookie at a French bakery might be sprinkled with fleur de sel. The perfume of roasted Sichuan peppercorns and the sound of dough slapping against countertops lures visitors down to the neighborhood’s subterranean food malls, where each stall consists of little more than a stove and a specialty: slow-cooked Cantonese healing soups; fragrant, meaty Sichuanese dan dan noodles; or Fujianese wontons, no bigger than a nickel, that spread their fronds in clear broth.

“I remember when you could count the number of Chinese restaurants in Flushing on one hand, and all of them were Cantonese,” said Tai Ma, owner of the Nan Shian Dumpling House, who has been in the restaurant business in Queens for 18 years. The number of Flushing residents born in China has doubled since 1990, according to census figures. And those immigrants have become more geographically diverse, said Pyong Gap Min, a professor of sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York.

“From the 1970s until recently, the Taiwanese dominated Flushing, along with Koreans,” he said. “Now it is people from all over mainland China.” Fujian, on the southeast coast, is still the primary source of immigrants to New York, he said, but many who arrive from there actually have roots in the north, center and west of China.

The shift means that the food of Flushing now includes dishes that don’t fit many American notions of Chinese food: griddle-baked sesame bread from China’s large Muslim minority, potato-eggplant salad from Harbin in the northeast, Beijing-style candied fruit, and grilled lamb skewers, from China’s long-unreachable western frontier near Kazakhstan. There is now a mind-bending variety of noodles and dumplings: the flour foods, (mian shi in Chinese), those wheat-based staples that feed China’s north and west, as rice traditionally feeds the southeast. (The Yangtze River is the divider.)

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