White Bear and the Flushing Mall
After posting about Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao last week, I just kinda got lazy about posting the rest of the Flushing things. So here we go and run through the whole list of stuff. After eating the soup dumplings, Steph and I google mapped our way to White Bear. It actually went like this:
"Do you know where you're going?"
"Not really. I think that says 'White Bear' in Chinese though. Out of the five characters I could read, those two seem to say 'White' and 'Bear.'"
"Really? It's not because it says White Bear in English?"
"Oh would ya look at that. Let's just eat. I'm hungry."
After seeing these wontons in chili oil on Kathy's blog, I knew that had to be one of our orders. I used to eat these a lot as a kid. In my butchering of Mandarin, the dish sounds something like 'hon yu chao shou'. Wow, that sounded bad just typing it. It means something like 'red oil crossed/mixed hand'. Yea I don't know ok? Wikipedia says that semi-pentagonal wontons are called caho shou in the Sichuan province. Either way, I used to eat them in this mall right by my elementary school, like alllll the time. Usually because Mom would say, "I want some" and I would say, "Oh yes I feel fat today. Let's do it." (We didn't really talk like that).
Oddly enough, I like this dish when it's not spicy. The chili oil they used at White Bear was really tame, and that's the way I like 'em for this dish. You don't really want it to burn out your tongue because the wontons are too delicate. When the oil is super fragrant, that's when you know what's up. Yeaaa buddy. I think White Bear also added some pickled mustard greens in there, which was a nice touch. Even though it's twelve wontons per serving (around $4), they go down really easy. When the wontons are slicked in oil, you could probably just bite down on this thing twice and swallow. Who needs chewing? It's overrated.
Just to see what else they had, we got some boiled dumplings as well. They ran out of pork and leek and we settled for pork and cabbage. They were delicious as well, although the wontons outshined the dumplings.
After the dumplings I wanted to show Steph what an oyster omelet was all about. Basically if you haven't had a Taiwanese oyster omelet, it's corn starch, eggs, oysters, some kind of vegetable, and mysterious red sauce. This doesn't sound that appetizing to most of you probably and Steph was a bit turned off by this as well. Corn starch has a funny texture when you pan fry it. If you didn't grow up eating this stuff, you probably wouldn't like it either. Whatever. More for me.
The version here at the Flushing Mall really isn't super great. I ate about half of it, mostly because I like oyster omelets. But they could do better. Here I must confess that it's difficult to isolate the variables that would contribute to a better tasting oyster omelet. When you require a special synthesis of shitty products to make a delicious dish... often I think the thing that makes it special is just magic. Some dishes just don't have... magic. That's right. They forgot to add the magic and pooo, it was not as good as it could have been.
And when you're at Flushing Mall, you have to finish the meal with a big ass bowl of shaved ice. This is the good stuff, because they drizzle condensed milk on it, add some mango syrup, and a scoop of mango ice cream. There were also some very unripe cubes of mango that were slightly off putting due to their crunchy texture. Maybe the Flushing Mall doesn't source their frozen mangoes from Trader Joe's. I know if they did, they would have some nice frozen mangoes.
It's a shame that I have to travel into Manhattan to go to Queens, when Brooklyn is so close to Queens already. I blame that on the MTA. booo. I always wondered as a kid why Chinatowns couldn't be located in a clean part of town. Now, I don't even care about the cleanliness. Now I just wish all that deliciousness in Flushing could be closer. Maybe one day they'll have a reliable line that runs from Brooklyn to Queens (and please no one say the G line...) When that day comes I could eat delicious wontons all the time!
White Bear
135-02 Roosevelt Ave.
Flushing, NY 11354
718-961-2322
@hungry,
Ah yes.. good suggestion... I just have to get a car!
@Dad,
They're medium sized? They're not the tiny ones and they're not the huge ones that people eat raw...
Danny
October 1, 2009 8:14 pm
They're all looked delicious to me. Is the size of the oyster the same as Taiwan's (small oyster)?
dad
September 30, 2009 11:11 pm
Time to start driving more. 30 minutes from BK-Queens.
hungry
September 29, 2009 12:37 pm