I dont eat xlb all that often these days - think they were good, broth nice, skin not too thick but manageable without breaking unintentionally. big menu, mostly non-chinese diners (from my limited observation seemed to all be eating the same items) but steady flow of asian customers picking up takeout orders.
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ngb is our middle kidās fav manhattan ctown restaurant but I haven/t been for about 10 years, When they first opened, they had one of the best (and only) XLBs. Iāve been meaning to revisit for a while, would love to go when weāre back in NYC!
best,
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looks amazing Jen, I love eel, and canāt wait to try that dish!
@Saregama @Ike @FlemSnopes and wife @JenKalb and I ate our way through Chinatown yesterday with stops at Bo Ky, Hong Kong Cafe, and Shu Jiao Fu Zhou. My favorite bites were the Teochew style braised duck and the curry chicken noodles at Bo Ky and the pork and chive steamed dumplings at SJFZ.
Iāve had better meals at HKC, everything was fine but Iāve had better renditions of the crispy chicken with garlic and salt/pepper soft shell crab elsewhere.
As a group we spent about five hour together, most of it talking, and I for one had a wonderful time. thanks to @Saregama for organizing and herding us through chinatown.
best,
ps when yāall have a chance, please post your photos!
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Lovely to get together and see folks again after a long break. Agree those two dishes at Bo Ky were the best and the fish noodles grew on me with the good condiments there! The dumplings at Shu Jiao Fu Zhou were a great value and I wish i had had time to buy some and take them home. I liked the crispy chicken, which is hard to find these days, but saw lots of other good dishes heading out I would have liked to try. Hereās the chicken.
Thanks so much to @Saregama and to everyone else for their good company and not dissing my water spinach with fermented bean curd obsession
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A lovely afternoon in all ways.
My favorite bites were the same (yikes maybe all our palates are getting streamlined 
j/k) with the addition of the pork & leek dumplings from SJFZ.
I had been craving the duck and the curry noodle soup since we last ate them, and both were as good as I remembered. Shout out to the staff who was so nice to us (bowls! plates! water jug refills! and asking if we enjoyed everything, which almost knocked @vinouspleasure off his chair 
). We also had the fish noodles as they were unique for the folks whose first visit this was.
My first time eating the dumplings at Shu Jiao Fu Zhou did not disappoint. We had pork & chive and chicken & mushroom, plus an order of the wheat noodles with peanut sauce. We thought we missed the lunch rush, though it turned out later that we had just lucked out and gotten there during a short lull,.
I did enjoy the food at Cafe Hong Kong (which was mostly new to me except the soft shell crab), but we adjusted our choices away from a few things that might have worked out better (they didnāt have the steamed carp so we skipped the fish entirely, and the crispy garlic chicken and the black bean ribs both tasted w bit of Maggi, which I donāt love). The salt-baked soft shell crab as good, as was the water spinach with fermented tofu that was our only vegetable for the day.
Dessert was sponge cake from Lucky King and their steamed molasses cake (probably not its actual name) that @DaveCook introduced us to on a prior visit.
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Thanks for the invite! I especially loved the fish noodles at Bo Ky. Havenāt been there in far too long ā great to rediscover it.
Iāll certainly be returning to Bo Ky in the future for those fish noodles and that curry.
I was also startled by how much I liked the PB wheat noodles at SJFZ when doctored a bit with some hot and soy sauces. I experiment (poorly) a lot with noodles at home and can never approach anything like that. Of course the dumplings were excellent as well, far better than my last visit to Kai Feng Fu in my neighborhood.
Lovely to chat with you all!
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Fish noodles without me. I will not forget this slight.
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Coincidentally we just went to SJFZ on Sunday as part of a family food tour. Also surprised how much I liked the PB noodles. Tho the owner said his noodle supplier is out of business and we pretty much got the last batch. Sorry but def not sorry.
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Where else did you go?
It was with Scott of Ultimate Food Tours. Fun tour. We also went to the new Spicy Village for soup dumplings and cucumber salad. Not bad at all. The space is much nicer than the old SV, and no one knows about it. Sichuan Hot Pot Cuisine for fish soup and string beans.
Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei Jia Xiang Feng Wei - yep thats the name, basement of East Broadway Mall. Fried dumplings were pretty good. I would prefer pan fried.
Duck spring rolls at Dim Sum Go Go, and sponge cake at a place known for sponge cake.
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Thanks to everyone for including us on a really nice food day in Chinatown. The food was great, so was the conversation.
We didnāt have a single dish that was less than very good, so thanks to the more experienced Chinatown folks for ordering so well. My favorites were the curry chicken and the duck at Bo Ky and the crispy chicken with garlic at Cafe Hong Kong (a dish Iād never had before).
The soft shell crab at Cafe Hong Kong was also outstanding, but maybe a little less well executed than the soft shell crab weād had a few days earlier at Great NY Noodletown.
The fish noodles were novel and really good.
I want to go back to Cafe Hong Kong and try their pasta dishes, like baked pasta bolognese and baked Portuguese style pork chops.
Thanks to everyone for indulging my request to go to Shu Jiao Fu Zhou. As I mentioned, one of my former ESL students from Beijing got her LLM (master of laws) degree at Columbia this year and she said she would travel down to Chinatown to SJFZ to buy big bags of their dumplings, so I was very curious about those dumplings. I can see why she thought the trip was worth the trouble.
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Took home frozen soup dumplings from supreme, ordered steam paper from Amazon, waited for water to boil and steamed for 11 minutes, just about as good as the restaurant which Iāve come to think of as mid level soup dumplings. Very happy to have them in our freezer.
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Kings kitchen for a shumai rice roll, beef chow fun and a fantastic plate of soy sauce chicken. This was the best example Iāve had to date of their srr, somehow the youtaio was still hot and crispy. Iāve been wanting a dish of beef chow fun for a couple of months but prefer it made with wider noodles.
$15 pp after tax and tip, I dunno, hard for me to justify the $100/pp dinners that we talk about in the nyc thread 
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Good to know about their soy sauce chicken!
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I dunno, hard for me to justify the $100/pp dinners that we talk about in the nyc thread
I hear you. I just spent $8 on lunch and Iām stuffed and wondering how much I can allocate for tomorrow.
I agree with @vinouspleasure and @backyardchef. Of course we all like the relaxed comfortable meals that fine dining used to be, when we can afford it. But there is always go to be a calculus - when it gets to be too crowded, noisy, and rushed, experimentation may not always work out, and the total package is not worth the moneyā¦ it gives us pause when we know delicious food is available for a lot less money and fuss. I also feel there gets to be a sameness to all these carefully composed plates that makes me veer away. Finding the ones that are really exciting and satisfying is not easy.
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I think of the two ends of the nyc dining spectrum as apples and oranges ā I enjoy both, and though sometimes Iām more into oranges, I still like the apples too!
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Not to be argumentative about this (since you all know Iād never do that), there is a āsamenessā that strikes at all levels of dining, not just at the ācarefully composed platesā places. If finances prevent dining at $100+/person places too often (or ever), I fully understand and appreciate that this will restrict experiences. But I wouldnāt rationalize that they arenāt worth it anymore than I would look down on those eating $7 lunches as not being refined. Iām happy to be able to afford $100 or more per person and sad that I cant afford to drop $1000 or more per person going to some places I think Iād enjoy. But Iām also happy to understand and enjoy the less expensive gems that exist.
Or, to paraphrase, what Saregama just cross posted with me and said in many fewer words. 
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I think itās hard to talk about āworth itā because thatās such a subjective notion. I think not even having the option to spend that kind of money on one meal makes me feel like it is not worth it (to me)-- especially when I know how much of the meal is of zero interest to me. If people NEED to experience something exclusive that makes them feel special in their life, I canāt tell them itās not worth it. Just like you wont convince me that the meal at Stone Barns at Blue Hill is going to be worth it. The visit and ambiance may be worth it. But the mealā¦a different story.
