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Yeah Shanghai Deluxe: To hell with soup dumplings: Go straight for the wontons, stuffed with ground pork and mustard greens.
(Photo: Joe Scafuro) |
Down-home Chinatown
If you don’t believe there’s such a thing as pure, unfussy (or un-greasy) Chinese home cooking, pay a visit to the M Shanghai Bistro & Den, on a quiet, leafy street in Williamsburg, where traditional Shanghainese dishes like shizi tou (called “Freddy Mercury balls” on the menu) and green soy peas with tofu shoots are served to neighborhood hipsters sitting at communal tables made of lacquered pine. Shizi tou (“lions’ heads” in Mandarin) are giant meatballs softened with water chestnuts, among other items, and if you find them a little too daunting, you can take refuge in healthful platters of sautéed morning glory in tea sauce, or six varieties of dumplings, including the finest example of the bedraggled, overexposed, overhyped Shanghai soup dumpling that I’ve tasted east of the mighty Yangtze.
Speaking of dumplings, Dim Sum Go Go is still the dorky white man’s choice for an esoteric Sunday-morning dim sum wallow, although the rest of the menu seems to be going slowly to seed. For a quick dumpling fix at any time of day or night, however, I repair to Fried Dumpling on Allen Street, where it’s always a pleasure to listen to the not-entirely-friendly ladies behind the counter speaking Mandarin in their sonorous Tianjin accents, and where not long ago I paid exactly $2 for five fried pork dumplings, two steamed vegetable buns, and a giant toasted slice of scallion-and-sesame pie, all festively packaged, with plastic knives and forks, in a small flotilla of Styrofoam containers.
Jean-Georges’s facsimile of fine Chinese dining, 66, is scheduled to open in Tribeca this month, but until it does, the place to prepare your palate is Yeah Shanghai Deluxe, in the heart of old Chinatown. The chefs there have perfected most styles of dumpling, plus adventurous platters of warm smoked fish, piles of sticky braised pork shoulder glazed in honey, and the best wontons in Manhattan, with long, swaying tails like goldfish. If you’re feeling really adventurous, the newest outpost of the fractious, constantly mutating Grand Sichuan International empire is on Second Avenue and 55th Street, where, among the usual array of overlubed, Americanized Chinese glop, you’ll find little wonders like candied strips of sweet duck skin, a dish called Chongquing spicy rabbit (rolled in sesame seeds and hot chili oil), and the formidable Chongquing spicy chicken, buried in a great crown of shiny red chili peppers.