Luxury Eats

And so we decided to begin the new year with dim sum. Manhattan's Chinatown wouldn't do — we'd been through that before: the tired waitresses; the faded, threadbare carpets; the subpar food. So, on the last weekend of 2007, we accounted it high time to get to Flushing, Queens, as soon as we could.

We walked up and down 39th Avenue looking for Gum Fung, but no luck. Just as we began to worry that it had closed, we noticed the rather large eating establishment looming over us at the address we had for Gum Fung: Jade Asian Restaurant. Gawking at it from the sidewalk below, we decided to call up Gum Fung. Same address, same place. The management may call it Jade Asian Restaurant now, but the hostesses know it's still ol' Gum Fung.

And it was — surprise! — fantastic. Eating at Gum Fung/Jade Asian Restaurant was pretty close to what I'd experienced at restaurants in China. (And not only because I could barely communicate with the staff.) I was one of the few non-Asian customers, and the place actually kind of felt like the fancy hotel dim sum parlor I'd been to in Beijing. (That hotel caters to many Southern Chinese visitors, so it's known for good dim sum, which is traditionally a southern cuisine.) Of course, it helped matters that the food was excellent — on par with the aforementioned Beijing dim sum, and far better than most Chinese food I've had here in New York.

Also, the restaurant looked like it could have been in China — except that the television was blaring bad American courtroom programs that were ignored by almost everyone nearby.

We liked the restaurant so much that we returned a couple of weeks later with our friend Suzy. For the record, dim sum, at least at Jade Asian, isn't just a weekend meal. The restaurant didn't seem much less crowded on a Tuesday at lunchtime than it had on a Saturday afternoon.

This time we were seated in dim sum–parlor Siberia (or should that be "Outer Mongolia"?): too far from the kitchen, so the food wasn't as fresh, and we got to choose from among the leavings that hadn't been scooped up by customers at the other tables.

First thing we ordered was one of my favorites from the previous visit:

Cheong fun — broad rice noodles filled with shrimp and doused in soy sauce (left). The rice flour gave the noodles an especially satisfying texture, and their juxtaposition with the shrimp and soy sauce made them nearly irresistible.

Another variety of cheong fun that we ordered consisted of the same noodles filled with yu tiao — fried, cruller-like bread — and smeared with hoisin sauce. This style of stuffed rice noodles was very different from the shrimp-and-soy-sauce variety, both in taste and in texture. But it was just as good.

Four more varieties of dim sum (from left): seafood dumplings in broth; fried tofu skin stuffed with chicken; sticky rice filled with chicken and wrapped in lotus leaf (known as lo mai gai, nuo mi ji, or zongzi); and har gau: steamed shrimp dumplings.

I barely touched the greens, and was strangely fascinated with the pear-shaped items that actually turned out to be fried, pureed potatoes filled with curried meat. Like Shepherd's Pie, as Suzy noted; a Chinese analogue to Shepherd's Pie.

Notice the unloved egg custard in the background. This was the only major disappointment. I had been expecting greatness — on our first visit, we had missed getting the last egg tarts by about twenty seconds, and kept asking the woman who wheeled the dessert cart around if she had any more each time she came by (so much so, in fact, that she remembered us several weeks later).

This time, we ordered egg custards as soon as we spotted them . . . and didn't finish them. Ah well, at least there are decent varieties available at the Egg Custard King and any number of other Chinese bakeries around the city. There's even an outpost of Fay Da Bakery right down the block, though each time we strolled on past Fay Da as we'd strolled before, far too full from Jade Asian to eat anything else.