So, one of the things that I have probably talked about in excess is my numerous trips to Chinatown! I love Chinatown! It's part of childhood, it lets me dip my feet into parts of a culture that I love, and it's just a really cheap place to get a GOOD bite to eat. So, here are a few of my favourite places to go to in Chinatown, just in case you were wondering where to go or where to take visitors!
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| Picture found on Yelp.com |
First up is this tiny little hole in the wall dumpling shop called Fried Dumpling! It is located on Mosco Street (right off of Mott Street, by the children's playground/basketball park = Columbus Park); the street itself is basically just a hill and you really can't miss it if you walk down or up the hill. The photo doesn't show it, but in the entrance are these strips of plastic that are usually held back and you just walk straight in - the plastic kind of reminds of me of those long strips that clean your car in the automatic car washers'. Back to the restaurant! It's barely even that, there are like four bar stools, but it's much better to get your order to go and sit in the park, or wander around Chinatown to your next location. Fried Dumpling sells the bare minimum: pork dumplings, pork buns, hot and sour soup, and maybe a drink or two (but I'm not sure on that one cause I really just go there for the dumplings!) They're $1 for 5 dumplings, or $1 for 4 pork buns. You cannot beat that! I've been looking through yelp, and some people have been complaining about the quality, but I've never had a bad dumpling - they are simply delicious!
You can also buy them frozen, $5 for 30 dumplings. I did that last time I went, and I am really happy! They're not pre-cooked, so you do have to make sure you cook them all the way through (because pork and getting sick), but for me that's not issue. They're so cheap, so delicious, and so quick to cook anyway that it's a much better deal (for me) than buying them pre-cooked and packaged. As you can see from the picture above, I've already eaten the majority of mine..
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| Picture found on Yelp.com |
Next up is a little Shanghainese place that my friend and I actually stumbled upon last year on a quest for soup dumplings. Since then, my friends and I have frequented place a lot. This is usually where I come for lunch before grocery shopping. There menu is quite a bit more extensive than Fried Dumpling, as is expected, but pretty much everything that we've tried has been great (and again, cheap). What my friends and I usually order is: 1 order of pork soup dumplings, 1 order of (pork) rice balls in soup, 1 order of baby bok choy with garlic, and 1 order of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaf. The soup dumplings, for those of you who have never had the fortunate to taste them, are amazing - you do have to be careful because they will burn you if you don't eat them properly, which means either waiting quite a bit or biting/tearing a small hole, tipping the soup out into your spoon and eating the soup and skin/pork filling separately. The rice balls are a bit harder to explain, they're a strange gelatin-like consistency with a ball of pork filling in the middle, and the whole rice ball (there are 4 in total) is floating in a plain broth. We like to rip up the rice ball, eat it, and then have a go at the pork filling. The bok choy is a green vegetable, I suppose it's a bit like Chinese broccoli (I think some restaurants may call it that, though choy sum is also sometimes called Chinese broccoli). It's really healthy for you and easy to cook if you ever decide to buy some of your own. The sticky rice is officially called zongzi, and is a traditional dragon boat festival food, but is now eaten a little more often than that. Basically, the rice (with a pork filling, usually) is steamed wrapped up in a bamboo leaf, and then you open the leaf and eat the inside. We have ventured outside of these four things, trying different noodle dishes, but these are 4 we almost always order. And when I go by myself, I'll usually just order soup dumplings and that will fill me up quite nicely.
This is getting a bit longer than I thought it was going to be, so I will stop this here and have another few places to try out later! If you're feeling really cheeky, you could always grab some $1 dumplings and then head over to the Shanghai Cafe for an actual meal, but only do that if you're quite hungry as the Fried Dumpling dumplings are actually quite filling!
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