Golden Rich 好想吃

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

Lovers of Taiwanese-style stinky tofu will know right when they open the door that they are in for a treat. The smell of fermentation hits you right at the front, enough so that a stinky tofu rookie was actually observed stopping in her tracks and retreating back out to the street when it reached her nose. Open up the restaurant's menu and five large photos of stinky tofu dishes take two out of the four pages.

The other two pages and the back focus on a surprisingly wide breadth of Taiwanese favorites from the bento boxes made famous on railways to three cup and popcorn chickens. The Taiwanese couple that runs the tiny corner shop is dedicated to bringing as much of their cuisine to Sunset Park as possible, a neighborhood that has a few choices for Taiwanese but usually from a mainland perspective and very focused.

Of course on any Taiwanese menu these days is beef noodle soup ($9, above and below), a dish whose "moment" does not want to fade. The version here is certainly near the best in the city, with super tender high quality meat and unique house made noodles. Lift them up with your chopsticks and notice the wavy edges. Bite into them for the wonderful chew and mouthfeel.

Recommended is to resist the urge of the spicy version they offer and do it yourself by adding the chili oil that is on each table. This lets you focus on their delicate savory broth and put just the right personal touch into it.

Don't be shy about the tofu, unless you already know it's not your bag. The fried blocks here are definitely stinkier and funkier than most locations that offer it but dumb it down quite a bit. With Golden Rich's version, you can vividly remember your first experience with the dish in a Taipei night market whether that be positive or negative.

In addition to a plate of ungarnished stinky tofu, they specialize in what they call "stinky hot pot." Four offerings are available with beef, seafood, pigs feet, intestines, or a combination of everything that is the signature dish. The beef stinky tofu hot pot ($13, below) uses those same beautiful cuts that were found in the noodle soup, but surrounds and submerges them with the tofu.

Also really enjoyable amongst the dish and rich soup of the hot pot is a really nice pig blood cake, dense with glutinous rice, as well as the tiny bowl of braised pork over rice that is served with every hot pot.

Amongst the Taiwanese favorites hinted before is their really simple bowl of pork chop over rice (below), a meal that usually never lives up to the one at Hua Ji in Chinatown. Here it is successful though, and uses a perfectly fried chop, bits of fried pork belly, pickled mustard greens, and a nice yet sparingly used sauce over the rice.

Come back many times and enjoy quintessential dishes like noodles with soybean paste ($7.50, below). This tofu is of the unfermented kind and is combined with ground pork and put over the same noodles found in the beef soup. Any dish that uses these should be considered, as they really are a star.

A nice array of flavors is in the dish, make sure to mix it up thoroughly to make sure the greens and sauce gets to every last noodle.

A couple burritos populate the menu as well, but thankfully this is not some sort of unfortunate fusion food and just an interesting way to translate. The beef burrito ($7, below) is actually niu rou juan bing (牛肉捲餅), rolled up goodness surrounded by a crispy fried wrapper. The essential pairing with the beef inside of these is scallions, some of which stick out one end with other crunchy greens. A lovely layer of sweet hoisin sauce permeates the whole thing, making every bite almost a dream.

The second time the roll was a bit soggy, but hopefully this is the exception to the rule. For such low prices, it is fascinating that everything can maintain such a high quality here across the menu, using good ingredients. Golden Rich is a real gem.

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SUNSET PARK Brooklyn

4001 8th Avenue

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Tasty Pot 味鼎

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

Since becoming enormously popular in the Bay Area a few years back, Tasty Pot has been testing their feet in the waters of Southern California, Florida, the Midwest and now a few on the East Coast including their newest in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, opened about a month ago. The Taiwanese hot pot trend has yet to secure a footing in this town. Pot Pa Hot Pot opened in Flushing early in 2018 but barely survived a full year.

Tasty Pot, with its own success elsewhere and a city that must be near peak Taiwanese exposure, will try to settle in. On a strip populated with other large eateries and KTV spots, the warming individual cauldrons await.

The dining room is a hodgepodge of colors and neon, textures of vinyl and metal, and shiny decor on every surface. Panels and solar shades have scenes of Taipei to surround the eating area and set the mood.

Besides the foundation of individual hot pots, part of the formula here is also providing Taiwanese boba drinks, of which they have a full menu from A-Cha brand. At lunch time, each pot comes with a standard iced green tea, so the boba menu was not sampled on the first visit.

At the top of the hot pot options are Taiwanese flavors such as stinky tofu and Taiwanese supreme spicy, but the first offering of beef hot soup ($13.99, above) is a great place to start.  The rich soup can be heated up from zero to four peppers, known as "flaming spicy," so feel free to go nuts. The thin slices of beef do not get overcooked too quickly, showing that quality is pretty good for the price point.

The specially-designed hot pot stand comes with a well-covered fire source that you can adjust or turn off yourself. The soup will remain bubbling for a long time if you let it go. Bits of tofu, meatballs, corn, vermicelli noodles, and a good amount of napa cabbage will require cooling before bites.

Each order comes with the option of an extra portion of vermicelli noodles or a bowl of rice. The green tea tastes a lot better once it has the soup broth to contrast with its sweetness. In addition to the bold tastes already in each pot, a set of three additional flavors is available on each table (below), a soybean paste, chili oil, and garlic soy sauce. After some experimentation, a fun combination of the three is great for dipping slices of meat.

Not as good as the beef is the kimchi dumpling hot soup ($13.99, above), Tasty Pot's ode to Korea. Unfortunately the napa cabbage and spices used do not really replicate fresh kimchi, and the dumplings are a little boring. After a recent couple days in Seoul, what it did most was raise a craving for kimchi jigae or soondobu. Keep these desires to your next visit to a Korean restaurant.

Like Korea, the restaurant has hot pots that try to replicate the flavors of Thailand (probably tom yum?), Japan (miso), and Sichuan Province, which should probably be turned down if the kimchi pot is any representation.

On a future visit, the cheesy milk hot pot is most looked forward to, with its freshly grated orange cheddar that melts after arriving.

I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World NYC is and always has been free. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better and you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World NYC is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

You can Venmo me @JAREDCOHEE or click here to send PayPal donation, no account is necessary. Thank you!

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SUNSET PARK Brooklyn
715 61st Street

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Nuan Xin Rice Roll

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

In its most traditional form, the kind of rice roll (fan tuan) served here at Nuan Xin was simple and came from Shanghai. The fried dough eaten for breakfast and known as youtiao was wrapped in glutinous rice and served with either sweet or savory soy milk depending on the preferences of the customer. In recent years, in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, the fan tuan game has been taken to another level, with all types of ingredients, extra wrappers, and so many options.

This wave has started coming to Chinese communities abroad as well, with all types of fan tuan being enjoyed in Chinatowns everywhere. Nuan Xin has come on the scene recently and in a little over a year expanded to four locations already. Two are located in Sunset Park, one in Bensonhurst, and most recently in Manhattan. They describe this location at 8th Avenue and 53rd Street their flagship.

In addition to a menu full of rice roll options, Nuan Xin is good news for bubble tea addicts as well as the quality continues to improve here in New York City. This now seems to be the choice for pairing with the rice rolls both here and back home, although look hard enough and you can get a cup of soy milk as well.

A medium signature milk tea (above) runs $3.25 with a 50 cent charge for tapioca. Grab a cup, a big straw, and order a few rice rolls to explore the menu. Despite being priced from $3.25 to $4.75, these are all dense and full of calories, one can go a long way towards filling you up, especially when paired with bubble tea.

An order of four is ridiculous and will lead to lots of leftovers.

Back in Taiwan, pickled mustard greens have been an ingredient for just about as long as fan tuan have been being created. Meat was not always an accessible and affordable filling, but Nuan Xin pairs their pickled mustard greens with a smooth and slightly sweet braised pork. The braised pork with preserved vegetable rice roll ($3.95, below) might have just been the winner of an initial order, topped off like others with their special cream sauce.

Nuan Xin uses purple sticky rice rather than white, extolling all the supposed virtues and health benefits that come with eating it. Regardless of whether this is true or not, this type of rice is slightly less chewy than the white, has a bit of sweetness and nuttiness, and works better for fan tuan, although certainly there are disagreements here.

The rest of the rice roll menu goes from basic vegetarian options to just about every meat you would want to put inside. One of the newer realities in Taiwan and elsewhere is that people are not so satisfied with simplicity any longer and having access to many choices is always the norm even for purveyors that have been around for some time. One option that has been around longer than most because of its connection to breakfast is bacon ($3.50, not shown), which oddly (for the uninitiated) goes perfectly inside a fan tuan.

The spicy squid rice roll ($4.25, below) was another interesting and enjoyable roll, made "spicy" through the sauce which takes on somewhat of an orange color from whatever they are using as pepper. This roll is close to the high end of the price points but only the eel roll is more expensive at $4.75.

No matter which roll(s) you choose, the experience of the "old ways" is replicated here, as each one is wrapped and packed to order. Seeing as how they soak the rice in water for hours before cooking to get the textures just right, this is essential so that the roll has all the chewiness still perfect when you take that first bite.

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SUNSET PARK Brooklyn
5103 8th Avenue

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開心紅豆餅 Happy Wheelie

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

As Flushing continues to fill up with more and more rich young mainlanders, they also bring with them their cosmopolitan appetites and desires for regional specialties. The latest business to fill a specific niche is Happy Wheelie, specializing in a Japanese dessert called imagawayaki that has been adapted and popularized in Taiwan as "red bean cake" (alluding to its original and most popular ingredient) or in Taipei as a "car wheel cake."

To find this stall, you will have to walk to the back of the Landmark Quest Mall, pushing past the mob in front of Joe's Steam Rice Roll, the Hong Kong specialist that is the narrow shopping center's biggest draw.

Without a ton of space to linger, it is easy to get hypnotized by the wheel cake making and stand right in the way of other folks trying to get back and forth. The talented chef will fill one hole in the special pan with batter, letting it cook a bit before adding the toppings of your choice. A second hole will be filled and the first will be delicately flipped over onto it. After the second half is done cooking, the cake can be removed and enjoyed hot.

In addition to red bean, they also have "cream" which is like a vanilla custard, taro, Oreo, dried radish, black sesame, and some combinations of these ingredients and cream. An order of 2 wheel cakes costs $5 no matter which options are picked, and takes around 3-5 minutes to prepare.

The red bean option (below) is probably the least sweet of the bunch and the most filling due to its density. If you are using this to calm a hunger that has crept up many hours before dinner, this is probably your best option. You can also combine the red bean with cream if desired, the latter of which does have a sweetness to it that should create a good mix.

The favorite on this day was the black sesame with cream combo (below), which satisfied on all fronts. Looking forward to trying some of the other options, but have a feeling that returning to this will always be a good choice.

Now that you have had your dessert, maybe you can pick up one of those rice rolls on the way out as well.

This is your entrance from Roosevelt Avenue.

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FLUSHING Queens
136-21 Roosevelt Avenue Shop B5B

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Nuro Noodles 台北傳統牛肉麵

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

There have been a few grocery stores in this large building on Northern Blvd over the years, the latest being the New Age Market, around for the last three or four. It contains products similar to many Asian markets, but caters mostly to Flushing's Chinese residents although the neighborhood in this area is mostly Korean. Shoppers of all varieties seemed to be enjoying it just fine.

In one corner of the market, a new noodle stall has popped up. It's Chinese name, "Taipei Traditional Beef Noodles" does a better job in describing it than the English does, which is just a play on the Mandarin word for "beef." They have three items for sale, including their signature beef soup ($11.95, below) and a tomato beef soup which is similar but not spicy. A braised pork over rice dish rounds out the menu.

At this price point, the bowl is not super cheap, but of a very high quality, especially for its location. The noodles down below it all, while not made in house, are really nice and chewy and make a very pleasant experience.

The advertisement lists the dish as spicy, and despite being hot enough they need to warn the white guy ordering it, I would describe it as low level. The braising gives the meat a slightly sweet taste, hunks of dense beef with fatty rims. It comes with a side of pickled greens that should be dumped in, and a little extra chili oil can be asked for if you want it spicier. They also sell small jars of this to take home for $5.

Once you procure your order, you can take it upstairs to a spacious dining area which looks over the market. This was fun, you can watch people shop the produce aisles as you scarf down your noodles.

The market (seen below) is also home to Bake Culture, a bakery that seems to be doing its best to ripoff wonderful Bake Code, which unfortunately is not around Flushing anymore. Don't be fooled.

The New Age Market, home to Nuro.

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MURRAY HILL Queens
160-06 Northern Blvd

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Q Town Asian Cuisine

TAIWAN 🇹🇼

This week sees the opening of a brand new Taiwanese restaurant in Elmhurst, at the always busy intersection of Broadway and Whitney Avenue just under the shadow of the LIRR tracks. As long as the food is good, this crossroads of the neighborhood should be a prime location for a restaurant to hang around a long time. The first word is almost fully positive, as our group of seven was generally impressed with the offerings.

There are quite a few tables so you can go in any size group, but grab seven friends and sit at one of the big round tables that accommodates eight. The menu is bewilderingly expansive and ordering as much as possible is a good way to attack this new restaurant.

We did just that, starting with the first page of "appetizers" which reads more like the list of stalls at the Shilin Night Market in the north of Taipei.

Blood rice cake $4.25

Oyster pancake $7.25

Fried stinky tofu $8.25

Taiwanese sausage $7.25

Hakka-style pork & dried tofu $14.25

Gua bao $3.75

Three cup chicken $12.25

Sautéed string beans $11.25

Crispy fried cuttlefish $11.95

Pork liver with scallions $11.25

Baby clam & ginger soup $8.25

Taiwanese stir-fried noodle $7.75

Pork chop over rice $6.95

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ELMHURST Queens

82-87 Broadway

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