We planned to meet my partner’s friend on the wonderful Roosevelt Island. For those that haven’t been to Roosevelt Island, there are literally 3 different ways to get there: the F train, the tram (cable car), or transportation via bridge from the Astoria side. With the hopefully slim possibility of living there, my partner wanted to meet their friend and also check out local food delights. Zhongzhong Noodles had been on my list for quite a while, so I figured now is a good time to try it out.

Flushing is the NYC mecca for Chinese food. It’s at the end of the 7 train line heading east, and it takes about 40 minutes from Manhattan on weekends. Many restaurants and stalls only accept cash, so it’s quite different than being in Manhattan or Long Island City. My partner had a friend that wanted to meet in Flushing to try out Korean BBQ. I thought there would be several near Main Street, but it seems all the decent Korean BBQ places are least a mile east of the Main street subway station.

We walked by this restaurant one evening as we were walking back, and I was reminded that this was something I wanted to try. At a quick glance, the interior seemed pretty spacious, and I always go back and forth on whether we can go here. My partner is never fanatical about noodles, but luckily this restaurant has other things such as dim sum and cold cut appetizers. This restaurant opened last year during the pandemic in October and seemed to have a pretty steady flow of repeat customers.

Astoria in the last few months has seen an uptick on Asian restaurants that aren’t fusion and are more authentic. This one just happens to be on Broadway near my partner’s old neighborhood. We’ve been around this area before going to eat Shanghainese food. Today, it’s for noodles. This was the braised beef tendon. It was marinated in chili oil, garlic, scallions, sesame oil, and other things that I probably missed.

It seems when it comes to hot pot, East Village is a thriving destination. Usually people try to go to 99 Favor Taste because it also has grillable BBQ meats in addition to hot pots. When people don’t have reservations and are quoted a 2 hour wait time, the next logical option is to look for another hot pot place which just happens to be this place since it’s a few streets down.

A friend was in town, and I saw that Tim Ho was near their hotel. This place was always on my list to try given that it had received Michelin recognition at its Hong Kong location. Given I’ve eaten at numerous dim sum places already, they tout themselves as the dim sum specialists, so I already have high expectations. I don’t remember the drink on the left, but the right was some type of mango cococnut slush.

We were around Central Park near the southern side, and this was on my list of restaurants to try. This new-ish Chinese (Shanghainese) restaurant is located where Joe’s Shanghai used to be in Midtown. It’s not too far from the Apple flagship store. The stir fry snow pea leaf was mighty tasty. You can taste the subtleness of that wine, and the vegetable itself was tender and delicious. The yang chow fried rice was very uplifting and fresh too.

It’s the evening and where could be a good place to get fairly traditional Cantonese style Chinese food? Dim Sum Palace! The pork ribs (páigǔ; 排骨) is pretty decent. It came out piping hot with a lump of black bean that probably was suppose to be mixed in the sauce. It’s a little different than other dim sum places, but still pretty good. The salted pepper prawns were really good.

This little spot closed to the edge of Flatiron is a decent place if you’re into Shanghainese food and are not close to Chinatown. The passion fruit lemonade was good. You can taste the passion fruit, and it mixed well with the lemonade. The chilled marinated cucumbers were also good too although I felt the cucumbers were not marinated long enough. They were crunchy with an OK kick to them.

This seems to be a new upscaled Chinese restaurant that we accidentally stumbled into. The decor is very modern and has a slight pretentious feel to it. I learned that the restaurant likes to advertise it hand makes basically all the dough. They gave this waffle like starter. It is similar to those red bean cakes but without the red bean. The dumpling sampler had 4 dumplings. This was a special, so I’ll try my best to remember (top left clockwise): some soup dumpling, some squid ink dumpling with gold flakes, another soup dumpling variant, and shu mai with (crab?