Eating In Translation

Sugar Club

What the menu lists as "toasted bread" I would call "toast."

Taiwanese Specialties

At first sight of dried scallops with squash ($15.95), you might ask, where are the scallops? The featured ingredient is present throughout, but — after being cooked and dried near the fishery, then rehydrated in the kitchen and torn to bits to release as much flavor as possible — the shellfish muscle meats are near-impossible to recognize. The whitish tidbit in the center I teased out just for the photo; most of the scallops were in shreds.

Like salt-cured meats, dried scallops are rich in umami, but the marine saltiness of their home waters is tempered with a sweet undercurrent. You'll need no prompting to eat your vegetables.

Previously: For English speakers the menu identifies the second dish shown here as "ginger chicken with sesame oil" ($11.95), but to customers who read Chinese, the characters that signify "three cup chicken" are more evocative. Equal parts sesame oil, rice wine, and soy sauce are cooked down, often in the presence of ginger, garlic, chili peppers, and sugar, until their flavors are absorbed by the chicken; basil is commonly added as a finishing touch. Since the liquids are largely reduced, when served the dish often sizzles. At a minimum, it should glow; so will you.

For more dishes from several meals, see my photo album.

Taiwanese Specialties
84-02 Broadway (at St. James Ave.), Elmhurst, Queens
718-429-4818
www.Facebook.com/Heart.Of.Taiwan

Kulu Desserts

The roster of sweet, soupy Cantonese desserts called tong sui (Tong Shway, literally "sugar water") can, at Kulu, be served hot or cold. In sweltering weather, tapioca pearls and taro in coconut milk ($3.75) might seem more enticing when chilled. Give the nod to the hot, however — not only for the sake of tradition but also to soften those chunks of taro — and let the AC do its job.

Previously, at other Kulu locations: an excavated view of "sawdust pudding" that reveals terraces of cream and finely ground cookie powder (my dining buddy quickly pegged the flavor, if not the texture, as tiramisu); green bean soup with seaweed; mango and pomelo in mango pudding; and, ready to be introduced in various guises, pulped durian.

Kulu Desserts
86-55 Broadway (Queens Blvd.-Justice Ave.), Elmhurst, Queens
718-751-9898
(one of several locations)
www.KuluDesserts.com

Songkran celebration on Woodside Ave.

White, golden brown, empurpled and black: The colors of the sticky rice were so captivating that I overlooked the colors of the mangos. Even though I returned to the vendor's table several minutes later to identify the crunchy bits spooned over my Thai dessert — not sesame seeds, but the less prosaic touch of toasted mung beans — the fruits still didn't register. I'd asked simply for "mango with sticky rice" ($7); mine was yellow-skinned, even more richly colored within, ripe, and sweet. Perhaps this was the default.

Perhaps, however, I could've gone green. Last year, at a Colombian bakery not far from this Thai street festival, I encountered mango biche (Bee-chay), prepared from an unripe, tart fruit. If this is an option, I count myself lucky to have a second bite at the mango: The 2017 Songkran celebration, first held on April 22, repeats on April 29.

For more photos, see the EIT page on Facebook.

Songkran celebration on Woodside Ave.
Woodside Ave. between 75th and 77th Sts., Elmhurst, Queens
www.Eventbrite.com/e/songkran-thai-new-year-festival-tickets-33550304865
(The 2017 celebration, first held on April 22, repeats on April 29)

Awang Kitchen

The textures were not dissimilar. As a chaser to my gulai otak sapi, or curry cow's brain ($10.99), the owner of this new Indonesian restaurant offered a jar of jus alpukat (regularly $3.99; comped). The menu calls it a milkshake, but the thick blend of avocado and condensed milk with sugar and ice, striped with chocolate syrup, clogged my straw at first sip. For curried brain and thick shake, a spoon serves best. Make that two spoons, one for each delicious course. To see more photos — most from a later group lunch capped off by a delightful crab egg foo young — see the EIT page on Facebook.

H/T Dan, who I know only as a fellow patron of the most recent Indonesian bazaar at St. James Episcopal Church.

Awang Kitchen
84-05 Queens Blvd. (Van Loon-Reeder Sts.), Elmhurst, Queens
347-492-9264
www.AwangKitchen.us

Fanesca: Easter soup for the Ecuadorian soul

Fanescas in Queens may be more diverse than finches in the Galapagos. My story on Ecuador's beloved Easter-season soup, and a list of restaurants, cafes, and food trucks where you can try it, appears on Culinary Backstreets.

Indonesian bazaar at St. James Episcopal Church

For the East Javanese dish lontong kupang ($7), cakes of compressed rice are paired with tiny shellfish. The kupang — sometimes identified as clams, sometimes, as mussels, and that appear minced but might very well be whole — are also an ingredient in a brownish paste that incorporates garlic, chiles, and, I'm pretty sure, sugar. With the back of a spoon, the paste was smeared partway along one inside edge of my empty bowl before being covered with broth, lontong, kupang, and lentho, or cassava cake fried till golden. The flavor of the paste, pungent yet sweet, insinuated itself slowly at first, then more quickly as I plunged my spoon to the bottom.

For more photos from multiple bazaars, see my slideshow.

Indonesian bazaar at St. James Episcopal Church
84-07 Broadway (St. James-Corona Aves.), Elmhurst, Queens
www.Facebook.com/IndonesiaFoodBazaar
Monthly

No. 1 Hunan

Shown not for the food (haven't tried it) but only for the easy fit of 1930s gambrel roofs to current commercial tenants.

Related: "When the breadth of religious practice in Queens, a product of the borough's diverse ethnography, meets its pre-existing building stock, you end up with an unexpected architectural topography among houses of worship."

No. 1 Hunan
9028 43rd Ave. (near 91st Pl.), Elmhurst, Queens
718-446-3333

New food courts planned for Queens

Good Fortune, a supermarket chain that took over several Hong Kong Supermarkets in recent years, is renovating the Flushing and Elmhurst locations and bringing two new food courts to Queens.

An announcement in Chinese, English, and Spanish of "food court space for rent" accompanies the floor plans shown here. The Flushing market remains open; its basement, previously home to a mini-mall, eventually will house 21 stalls and provide seating for 400 customers. The Elmhurst market, now closed, seems destined for a complete makeover; ultimately that location will house 31 stalls and seat 680. Opening dates for the new food courts — and the prospects for a third Hong Kong Supermarket, on Hester St. in Manhattan — are unclear.

New food courts planned for Queens
Elmhurst: 82-02 45th Ave. (82nd-83rd Sts.), on the site of a former Hong Kong Supermarket
Flushing: 37-11 Main St. (37th-38th Aves.), in the basement below the market currently branded Super HK

Lhasa Liang Fen

No stiff plastic pennants were strung from the narrow green awning; no "grand opening" banner blanketed the window below. From outside, there was no obvious sign that this Himalayan storefront had served its first customers only a day earlier.

Inside, however, was a sign of a different sort: a tray of khapsey (shown, in the second photo, as I found it, partially depleted by previous patrons). These celebratory cookies take many forms. The dough might be fashioned into elaborate symbolic configurations or humbler twists; they might be fried in mustard oil, another cooking oil, or in butter; the resulting khapsey might be a little salty or, like these, sugar-dusted and more sweet. H/T Joe DiStefano, of Chopsticks and Marrow, for the observation.

Also shown: this tiny's restaurants raison d'être, laphing. (In the names of the restaurant and of one menu item, they're called liang fen, the Chinese equivalent, but elsewhere on the menu they're called laphing. Why the different names, I haven't figured out.) The most common variety in New York, made from mung beans, is pale, often to the point of transluscence, and very slippery. Prepared from the starch of yellow split peas, this laphing serpo ($4.95), or yellow laphing, is less of a challenge to chopstick skills, but the blend of chile and sesame oils will numb your lips just as readily.

Lhasa Liang Fen
81-15 Broadway (Pettit-Britton Aves.), Elmhurst, Queens
646-684-7208