Souvenir Chronicles: NEW YORK CITY: EATING IN FLUSHING'S CHINATOWN

February 17, 2020

We had to be at JFK Airport by early afternoon for our flight home. Andrew was at work and we had the morning to kill, so we decided to go grazing in one of our favorite neighborhoods--Flushing, which is located in the borough of Queens.

The more I learn about Flushing, the more I wonder why I had never heard of it before Andrew introduced us to it in 2018. For example, it has the third busiest intersection in NYC, behind Times Square and Herald Square. Even now that I know about it, I never hear of anyone else who has been there.

Until about 1970, the population of Flushing was mostly white with a smattering of Japanese and South Koreans, but in 1970 a wave of Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese arrived in NYC and started to settle in Flushing. At the time, Manhattan's Chinatown was inhabited by primarily Cantonese speakers, so it makes sense that a separate neighborhood was formed. Flushing is now substantially larger than Manhattan's Chinatown (72,000 and 48,000, respectively), and is in fact the world's largest Chinatown. By the way, there actually are several other smaller Chinese neighborhoods in New York City, where 6% of the overall population is Chinese-American.

On our first trip to Flushing two years prior, Andrew took us to his favorite dumpling spot, White Bear, a little hole in the wall on Roosevelt Avenue.

We ordered the same thing we had on our first visit, the item that drew us back to Flushing on this trip: wontons with hot sauce--spicy, flavorful, and pretty much indescribable. And guess what? These wontons were just as good as the ones we had eaten two years before.

The dumplings were just our appetizer. Our next stop was First Lamb Shabu, a lamb-focused Chinese hot pot restaurant. When I just looked it up online, it says it has been permanently closed, which makes me wonder how devastated Flushing has been by the Covid epidemic we are currently experiencing.

After doing a little research today, I discovered that Flushing actually has had one of the lowest rates of Covid in the five New York boroughs. This article speculates that perhaps residents were hearing from family members in China about how bad the disease was and were taking extra precautions early on, like wearing a mask and closing or limiting activity in businesses. Also, wearing a mask in Asian countries was already a cultural norm for those who were ill or exposed to someone who was ill. In fact, when we were there, we noticed quite a few people wearing masks. We were just beginning to hear more details about how bad Covid was in China, and honestly, seeing all the masks made us a little uneasy--not about interacting with the residents, but about what might lie ahead.

Anyway, back to First Lamb Shabu!

The restaurant was a long, narrow room with back-to-back booths on one side and the kitchen on the other.

The menu was fairly extensive, with 18 options for type of "pot," or the hot broth that the rest of the ingredients would be cooked in. There were 4 seafood options and 22 meat options. Among the meat options were ox tongue, ox aorta, pig kidney, pig brain, duck paws and Spam (!). There were 21 vegetable options, including chrysanthemum greens and lotus root. There were 10 types of meat balls. Perhaps most amazing of all is that there were 22 mushroom offerings, most of which we had never heard of!

The basic hot pot concept is that you have a simmering pot of soup stock brought to you along with whatever ingredients you have ordered. You put the raw meat and vegetables you ordered in the hot pot to cook in the broth.

Bob had read that we should order lamb spine and lamb ribs, so that's what we ordered, along with some other things.

The pot came with the lamb backbone and ribs already in it.