Samuel C.
Yelp
If you love Chinese food,
(And what Yelper does not?)
and you are visiting New York City,
Then a trip to the New World Mall Food Court is an absolute MUST.
1) Chinatown in Manhattan is dead. It is a shadow of its former self.
Little Italy, the Jewish Lower East Side and Chinatown in Manhattan are all running on the fumes of memories.
The young people moved to other neighborhoods.
The customer base moved to other neighborhoods.
The exciting restaurants moved with them.
2) The Chinese food moved to Flushing in Queens.
So did all the stores, and so did the middle class and wealthy Chinese customers.
(Okay, the Chinese customer based divided itself between other neighborhoods in Queens and the suburbs of Long Island. Flushing was just a good central point in which to do business.)
3) An obvious difference between Chinatown in Queens and Chinatown in Manhattan is that Chinatown in Queens has many major large supermarkets. These are as large or larger than the typical Safeway. They have every kind of fish you can think of - including eel, every kind of meat you can think of including all parts of the pig, and cans and jars from all over Asia.
And those supermarkets are filled to the gills with East Asian customers.
Grocery stores in Manhattan Chinatown are the size of a living room.
They have lots of Asian customers to be sure, but they simply can not compete with Queens.
4) Flushing is easy to get to. Get on the number 7 Subway. Go to the end of the line. You are there. Roosevelt and Main where you get off is the epicenter of Flushing Chinatown.
5) Yes, there are free standing famous restaurants in Flushing Chinatown.
However, most of the action is in food courts.
Food courts are everywhere.
Many buildings have food courts.
Buildings that don't have food courts may still have a warren of interesting East Asian enterprises that are not restaurants.
But if you are there to eat, you want to find the buildings with food courts.
They won't be hard to find.
6) The New World Mall is one of the best.
The food court is in the basement.
There is however a very interesting barbecued duck place on the first floor where you come in to the mall.
There are lines and lines of Chinese people waiting to buy their duck there.
I assume they are not waiting in line because the duck is terrible.
7) On the second floor of the New World Mall is JMart.
JMart is the Japanese answer to HMart - and is the biggest Japanese supermarket I have seen that is not in Japan.
It is an amazing place.
It takes up the entire second floor and is absolutely jam-packed with customers of every East Asian nationality imaginable.
Just the vegetable stands and the fish stands will knock you for a loop.
8) The food court has twenty seven different stalls - all serving East Asian food.
Most of them do not serve a format you would readily recognize.
There are Uyghur places, there are Malatang places, there are three-flavor-fish places, there are brown sugar boba places (that latter one I recognized), there are pancake places, there are Taiwanese places (I recognize that one too but it is not so common), there are Thai street food places (no curry on the menu), there are chicken sandwich places, there are lots of noodle and ramen noodle places (okay, that one I recognize too) ... and the list goes on.
I had Malatang from one of the three Malatang places. I gave the stand five stars.
I could probably skip a few of the stands in the New World Mall.
(I am not in a huge rush to have anything from Kung Fu Tea.)
But I would say there were at least twenty places that I was dying to eat at.
One down.
Nineteen to go.