Eating In Translation

Cupid Cheese Fruit Cake

Warm cheese mellows durian, even the double dose offered by the "super" pie shown here. (Joe DiStefano has made a similar observation regarding durian pizza). On a recent food crawl with a dozen friends — none who loves the pungent "king of fruits" as I do, but all of them game to try something new — this ready-sliced pie disappeared as quickly as any other dish.

H/T Rich Sanders, Ethnojunkie

Cupid Cheese Fruit Cake
New York Food Court
133-35 Roosevelt Ave. (Prince St.-College Point Blvd., stall 18), Flushing, Queens
917-908-0383
www.Chowbus.com/menu/Cupid%20Cheese%20Fruit%20Cake/1702

Super HK Food Court closed until further notice

(Update, February 2020: The Super HK Food Court has reopened.) Someone forgot to tell a tankful of large gaping fish, but everyone else seemed to have pretty much cleared out. This food court, which replaced a mini-mall in the basement of the Super HK market, opened in November 2018 with some two dozen stalls. The original vendors served food from Shaanxi, Jiangnan, Shaxian, Wenzhou, Lanzhou, Shanghai, Sichuan, and Taiwan; a recent addition served Uyghur cuisine native to China's Northwest.

The market on the ground floor remains open (and busy). The sibling HK Food Court, in Elmhurst, remains open, too, although only half of its stalls are occupied. Beyond the language of the sign itself — "until further notice" — at the moment I can't offer more.

Super HK Food Court
3711 Main St. (37th-38th Aves., in the basement of a like-named supermarket), Flushing, Queens (reopened, after about two weeks)
HK Food Court
8202 45th Ave. (82nd-83rd Sts.), Elmhurst, Queens (remains open)

Uyghur Apandi Food

Nan kordak paired crusty bread with stewed lamb and vegetables. Kuurdak, as commonly spelled, can be prepared with lamb organs instead, or with other meats except pork. (This stall, like many Central Asian kitchens in New York, keeps halal.) Swap in chicken for the lamb, and belt noodles for the bread, and you'd have da pan ji.

Also shown: home-style lagman, likewise with lamb.

Uyghur Apandi Food
Super HK food court, stall 7
3711 Main St. (37th-38th Aves., beneath Super HK supermarket), Flushing, Queens
917-476-2612
(I've also spotted a like-named food cart on Prince St. near 39th Ave.; that day the proprietor planned to open in midafternoon)

Meiling Snacks

This steamed roll, at first glance, might seem to cradle well-cooked mini-franks. In fact, those are fruits. Jujubes, when first ripe, have a taut skin, often yellow-green patched in brown, and an apple-like crispness and flavor. Mature, they wrinkle, sweeten, and take on a mahogany color that suggests another common name, Chinese dates. (Mind the little pits.) Although just seven jujubes are in sight, you likely know that Chinese cultures accord good fortune to the number eight, a homophone for "prosperity." Sure enough, one more jujube was concealed deep within the folds.

Meiling Snacks (美龄小吃)
136-21 Roosevelt Ave. (Main-Union Sts., inside a mini-mall), Flushing, Queens

Chinese taffy vendor

For want of a proper name, I'll call this street food "Chinese taffy." Despite the crushed peanuts, it's not out-and-out sweet (note the bit of green), nor is it fully savory. It is, however, fresh enough to droop under its own weight.

H/T Joe DiStefano, Chopsticks and Marrow

Chinese taffy vendor
This afternoon, on the west side of Main St. between 41st Rd. and Sanford Ave., Flushing, Queens

Sangza vendor

Also transliterated as sanzi (with a near-identical pronunciation), these fried dough twists are a common street food and teatime snack in China's Xinjiang province. Sangza have also migrated, with the Hui and Uyghur minorities, elsewhere in China and, lately, to Flushing's Chinatown.

I've come across two street vendors, in fact, who sell sangza a few blocks south of the Flushing-Main St. 7 train terminus. One, a man who sells long, doubled-over strands, sits on a stool beside a wire pushcart, the sort that often carries groceries or laundry instead. The other, a woman, makes do with a less elaborate setup. She perches on a large white tub that might once have held MSG, and bags of her two-bite dough twists — they're crunchy, and a little sweet — are framed in the upturned lid of a cardboard box. She seems grateful for business.

Sangza vendor
This afternoon, on Main St. near the southwest corner with Sanford Ave., Flushing, Queens

Porcelain berry

Porcelain berry (Ampelopsis glandulosa var. brevipedunculata) arrived in the United States from East Asia in the 1870s, as an ornamental. Today it is widely considered an invasive. The vine, a member of the grape family, tolerates many sun, soil, and moisture conditions, and its seeds are readily distributed by birds and other wildlife. The showy, speckled fruits are edible for humans, too, but they tend toward what the Brooklyn Botanic Garden describes as "the winning combination of slimy and bland." Food for the birds, safe from foraging fingers.

Porcelain berry
Dangling from a chain-link fence in Flushing, Queens

200 Gram Noodles: From the Streets of Chongqing

After moving to Flushing three years ago, Tingting Li missed her home city's most famous noodles, "which in the Chinese name of her restaurant are called xiǎo miàn. 'Small noodles' would be an overly literal translation. 'Small as in simple' explains them better, she tells us (in Mandarin; one of her two business partners translates to English). Eating them is a 'very casual thing' back home. 'No big deal … like you brush your teeth.' "

Finding them in New York, however, was another matter. Read more about the "local flavor noodles" that evoke her previous home on Culinary Backstreets.

Good news from Golden Mall

Correction: Previously I had written that Flushing's Golden Shopping Mall, in its entirety, would close at the end of July 2019. Subsequently I've learned of good news: The street-level businesses will remain open while the lower level (shown: Tianjin Dumpling House) is renovated over the course of three to four months. When the lower level reopens (alas, without Chengdu Tianfu), the street level will be made over. Ultimately, four new floors will be built atop the current structure.

Golden Shopping Mall
41-28 Main St. (at 41st Rd.), Flushing, Queens

Dae Sung Korean Noodle

Even at the height of summer, kongguksu — a cold soybean-based noodle soup — was not the most-desired dish at our table, though it might have been the most photogenic. The haemul pajun (below, being scissored before serving) was a superb version of this ubiquitous Korean seafood pancake, thicker and less oily than most. On a return visit, we'll tweak our order — one soup fewer, one pajun more — and attempt to decode the well-seasoned pancake batter.

H/T Roger Gans

Dae Sung Korean Noodle (aka Dae Sung Kalguksu)
4514 162nd St. (45th-46th Aves.), Flushing, Queens
718-460-0088
www.Facebook.com/pages/Dae-Sung-Korean-Noodle/2007748856208690