Eating Our Way Through New York Part 1, Asian Festival

For a delightfully delicious birthday celebration, this week Adam and I spent two days eating our way through New York. Now admittedly, our posts have been coming fewer and farther between, but they also seem to be growing larger in scale. As a result, today’s three-part post will cover the dishes of not one, but nine different countries. So, put your eating shoes on, settle in, and let’s get hungry.

As mentioned, our big city adventure was in honor of a special birthday, (although I won’t tell you which one) and the festivities included tickets to the Asian Festival at the Sheridan La Guardia in Flushing and a surprise dinner somewhere in Tribeca that Adam worked hard to keep a secret.

Once we checked into our hotel and our bags were deposited, we logged onto hopstop.com and printed out directions to the festival’s location. The day was young and there were dumplings to be had!

After a subway ride and a few blocks walk, we found ourselves at a dead end surrounded by industrial buildings. No one was around. The only business we passed was a nude club called The Play Pen. We were in the wrong spot.

I didn’t understand what had happened, I studied the directions but we had not misstepped. That’s when I realized the devil truly is in the details. Instead of typing in 39th Avenue, Adam hit 39th STREET. Not only that, but somehow he had selected the wrong borough. Instead of eating our weight in noodles in Queens, we were lost in some warehouse district in Brooklyn where I feared we would stumble upon the shady dealings on a gang of mobsters and be dumped into a vat of concrete merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Obviously since I am here to relay this account, we were not murdered by mobsters. After flagging down a cab and footing the bill for a ride to the correct address, we received our wristbands and finally entered a haven of Asian cuisine.

With the booths of 20 area restaurants, representing the up-and-coming best in the borough, offering all kinds of steamed, roasted and stir-fried delights, I soon forgot all about the morning’s misadventures.

First we sampled the wares of Java Village, an Indonesian restaurant in Elmhurst. Their specialties included mie ayam, an Indonesian version of a Chinese noodle dish with chicken and flat pasta, and basko telor, beef meatballs stuffed with a quail egg; a popular street food.


Tempe, fermented soybean cakes that originate from Java, one of Indonesia’s 6,000 islands, was also served, as was another common dish, daun singkong, or cassava leaves. Pervasive in Indonesian stir-fries and amazingly high in protein and vitamins A and C, cassava is a staple food on some of the more arid islands where rice doesn’t grow.

After making our way around to the beer and sake sampling tables, we followed our noses to Hahm Ji Bach’s Korean barbeque station. Easily the most well liked fare at the Festival, Hahm Ji Bach’s barbeque beef and pork short ribs were fall-off-the-bone delicious.

The most typical variety of Korean barbecue, or gogi gui, is galbi, beef marinated in soy sauce, water, garlic, sugar and onions and cooked on a charcoal grill often built into the center of the dining table.

Also offered was kimchi malee, another Korean favorite. A traditional dish of fermented vegetables such as Napa cabbage, radish, green onion and cucumber, kimchi is prepared in hundreds of different varieties and is the most common side dish in Korean cuisine. As pork belly is another favored food in Korea, the kimchi malee, pork belly rolled with kimchi, was a deliciously sweet, smoky, tangy and crunchy Korean treat.

With chopsticks poised and ready, we stopped at the Bownie Restaurant booth for a taste of Sri Lanka. Similar to, but generally much spicier than South Indian cuisine, Sri Lankan preparations are believed to be among the hottest in the world.


In addition to breaded fish cutlets, often referred to as “short eats” or snacks, Brownie served up some iddiyappam, a kind of noodle cake typically served as a main dish with coconut sambol. Made with ground coconut, chilies, dried, cured tuna and lime juice, coconut sambol is a spicy dry paste that should be used in moderation by the uninitiated.

Next, the sight of a roasted pig head drew our attention to Payag, a relatively new Filipino restaurant in Woodside. Usually the centerpiece of special celebrations, the suckling pig, or lechón, was perfectly moist and tasted of anise while the skin was so wonderfully crisp that you could instantly tell how painstakingly it had been prepared.

In addition, Payag served up some kinilaw na isda, a Filipino version of ceviche that uses vinegar as the curing agent instead of lime juice, and humba tartlets. Humba typically refers to slow-braised pork belly, although Payag uses knuckle meat, glazed with cane sugar and cooked with salted black beans and star anise. After popping back a couple tartlets it was easy to see why humba is considered one of the delicacies of the region.

Before wandering out onto the terrace we stopped for a helping of Ice Fire Land’s Taiwanese specialty, shabu-shabu. Also known as hot pot, shabu-shabu consists of a broth, Ice Fire cooks theirs for over 20 hours, made from various fruits, vegetables and meat bones, that is then served simmering over a cooking unit.

When ordering a hot pot you not only decide what kind of broth you would like, such as chicken, herbal or hot and spicy, but also what ingredients you would like to add to it. Thinly sliced raw beef, leafy vegetables, mushrooms and seafood are common and are served on the side for the guest to dip into the bubbling broth. The raw components cook quickly and should be plucked out again to be eaten with a savory and spicy dipping sauce of soybean oil, garlic, shallots, chilies and dried shrimp. The soup, which becomes more and more flavorful with the addition of each new ingredient, is drunk at the end of the meal.

As we walked outside the mouth-watering aroma of grilling meat guided us to the booth of Sedap Taste Good where we found what could be considered one of Malaysia’s most iconic dishes. Passers by gobbled up skewers of chicken and beef satay, served with a traditional peanut and coconut milk sauce, just as quickly as they could be produced and with a meat stick in each hand we contentedly nibbled away as we watched the fragrant smoke rise into the pleasantly sunny afternoon air.

Next we shared a generous portion of Taste Good’s curry laska. A popular soup made with thick noodles, bean sprouts and tofu in a sweet and spiced coconut gravy, the laska as well as the satay were both worthy of the restaurant’s name.

While on the subject of Malaysia, a table inside that we had stopped at earlier was offering samples of another Malaysian treat, coconut jam. Served simply on a triangle of toast, I regret now that we had not purchased a can to take with us.

After eyeing the strangely beautiful produce at the small farmer’s market, curiosity dictated that we sample a steamed yak momo from the Himilayan Yak Restaurant of Jackson Heights. A popular street food in Nepal, momos, or dumplings, can be made with various fillings, such as goat, buffalo, chicken, pork or yak.

Served with an avocado cream and a spicy chili sauce for dipping, the momo definitely tasted like yak, not that I have any frame of reference for the flavors of yak, but it was not altogether unpleasant. Not that I’m going to run out and buy a yak filet, mind you, but my curiosity was indeed satisfied.

For dessert we polished off a few mini cupcakes by Natural Vegan Way with such intruiging flavors as wasabi, green tea and pandan. Although I was not sure exactly what pandan was, I popped one of the slightly green cupcakes into my mouth. Whatever it was, it tasted of citrus, pine and delicate tropical flowers.

While snagging a few more for later and chatting with the NVW rep, we found out that pandan refers to the leaves of the screwpine tree that are commonly used in Southeast-Asian desserts and savory dishes. Sounds good to me. Anything that can make a vegan confection taste that yummy is ok in my book.

Putting down our chopsticks for the final time and procuring our parting grab bags, which included the New Asian Cuisine cookbook, we made our way back to Time Square and our hotel where we digested the afternoon’s adventures and prepared for a night on the town.