恭喜发财 Chinese New Year in New York

Gong Hei Fat Choy! 

 Last week was the end of Chinese New Year, which may not mean much to many of you but for the thousands of Chinese Americans in the United States and their biggest fans - the New York Jews - it is a big deal. Yes, nobody admires the Chinese as much as the Jews. We New York Jews are famous for our love of Chinese - particularly Cantonese - food. For most of us, Chinese food was the portal that introduced us to the discovery of non-kosher food, and for a lot of otherwise observant New York Jews, it was enough. I have known families who kept fully kosher homes, refused to eat at the homes of relatives whose cutlery was suspiciously less than kosher, and even timed the hours between eating meat and milk. They would, however, drop all pretension when it came to going out to a Chinese restaurant. Shrimp suddenly became kosher, and although nobody ordered the pork, they didn't mind if it crept into the egg rolls chopped up into unrecognizable bits, or if their ginger chicken was sauteed in the same wok as the spicy pork. 

Peking Duck at Duck King, Edgewater, NJ. 

The academic study "Safe Treyf: New York Jews and Chinese Food" notes that the fact that the Chinese staff didn't resemble any "Goy" that our forefathers had previously been beaten up by, and the fact that there was no milk on the menu added to the attraction. Over the years, every Jew in New York began to style themselves as an expert on Chinese food. This is, by now, an almost universal attribute. Everybody thinks that "their" Szechuan Palace or Hunan Empire is the real and authentic one that "Chinese people" would eat at if only there were any Chinese people nearby who would eat there... 

Dim Sum at Jing Fong

Recently, Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker editor and grand old man of American food writing penned a verse reflecting the obsession New Yorkers have with Chinese regional foods:

Have they run out of provinces yet?If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.Long ago, there was just Cantonese.(Long ago, we were easy to please.)But then food from Szechuan came our way,Making Cantonese strictly passé.Szechuanese was the song that we sung,Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.Then when Shanghainese got in the loopWe slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao,Came along with its own style of chow.So we thought we were finished, and thenA new province arrived: Fukien.Then respect was a fraction of meagreFor those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame,Plus some others—too many to name.

Trillen got in a bit of trouble for that,  by the way. In his generation Chinese Restaurants were one of the few places where a Jew could exhibit racist behavior toward anybody: mocking the Chinese waiters or the names of food was part of the the spectacle. You sit there at a big round table nibbling on fried noodle sticks dipped in "duck sauce" that no self respecting Chinese person would ever eat with your uncles and cousins and anticipate the cringe as the bad jokes about sum dum goy take over the conversation. And no, we are not beyond that yet. 



New Jersey, in particular, is a wasteland when it comes to Chinese food, odd given its proximity to New York City and the large amount of Chinese who reside in its suburbs. Chinese families drive over to New York when they want to shop or celebrate. NJ boasts great Korean and Japanese restaurants, but most of the Chinese ones are either Fukien-staffed take-outs serving disgusting gleet or Panda Palaces spooning out pre-frozen egg rolls and Sweet and Sour Pork to aging suburbanites who dine with forks and spoons. There are a few exceptions: we went for Chinese New Year to Duck King in Edgewater, NJ for Peking Duck. Duck King has an English menu and a separate Chinese, and also, this being New Years, offered multi course family banquet menus. It was packed with Chinese families, and the waiters were a bit overwrought with the New Year Crush, but it was a fine night out nonetheless. 

Mom and Dad out for Peking Duck

We also met up with some Hungarian friends who were in NYC to perform with the Pinter Bela Company Theater at the Barishnikov Arts Center. Gabor and I go way back, and we took a long walk across southern Manhattan, crossing the Lower East Side into Chinatown and ending up in the West Village. For lunch we checked into the Jing Fong, an old school Cantonese dim sum palace we had previously always missed. It was a first experience of Dim Sum for the Hungarians, who left it to us to order and we stacked the table with dumplings, rice rolls, and shrimp from the carts. 

Eventually we took pity and got him a fork

It seems that the savviest Chinese know to demand seating near the kitchen in order to get dibs on the good stuff as it comes out on the carts. By the time the carts get to the foreign devils seated at tables near the center of the room there is nothing left except the most well known dishes - shiu mai, spring rolls, and har gow shrimp. The place was, as the Evil Clown in the White House would say, HUGE. One of our friends got lost on the way back to the bathroom.  

The Shiu Mai are good, but the chicken feet at Jing Fong stand out.

I'll be posting on and off while I am in the USA. Presently my camera is not working up to par: it works, but not as conveniently as it should, so I have had less to illustrate blog posts with. Don't worry: New York Jew Eating Chinese Food goes to Flushing soon...