Downhill alert!

So I have officially begun my adventures into the NYC Chinatown. When it comes to choosing ethnic restaurants, there isn't any source that is truly reliable. I have long given up on Citysearch, a website that seemed to have been sold to the other side. Zagat usually isn't very helpful, and can be outdated due to its long delay between its reviewing and publication times. Michelin, useless to say, is more geared towards fine cuisine. Chowhound is a pretty up-to-date and honest (though very subjective) information pool. But with the mind-boggling number of restaurants in NYC, the chance of finding current information on one particular small place is pretty slim. In Taiwan, going out to eat with this lack of information is often called "watching out for landmines (踩地雷)." The landmines refer to those restaurants with bad food that cannot be easily detected by a casual passerby.

Anyway, the downhill alert is not for a new place. I went to Joe Shanghai (鹿鳴春) for crab soupy buns and wonton soup with my friend Ada. Both were very bad dishes. I may have been spoiled by the soupy buns at Ding-Tai-Fung (鼎泰豐), a Taiwanese restaurant chain that arguably produces one of the finest soupy buns in the world. But still, I do not rememeber Joe Shanghai's soupy buns to be this terrible -- the soup was greasy with no obvious crab flavor; the buns too large; the wrapper too tough on the teeth but too elastic to hold its shape. The look and the taste of them were really bad. The wonton soup was also disappointing. The pork filling didn't seem to have been properly prepared -- it was too dry. And the soup was much just a colored MSG solution. Now, I don't have strong feelings against MSG. I think it can be used cleverly to bring up the flavors that are already in the dishes. But to use it as the main flavoring agent is every bit against the principles of cooking.

I tried Golden Bridge (金橋, 50 Bowery) for dim sum today with Mike. There was no wait at 2pm on a Sunday. We ordered Ju-Pu tea, chrysanthemum with Pu-Erh (菊普), which was decent. The food selection wasn't great, but we didn't go out of our way to chase down carts. Overall the fillings of most dumplings were good, especially the scallop dumpling and Chao-Chou Fen-Guo, but the dumpling wrappers were too thick. The turnip cake used too much rice flour and tasted pasty. Beef short ribs was pretty good. I will keep trying different dim sum places. Now if I can just find a decent Taiwanese breakfast place in Chinatown I would be really happy. Flushing is a crushingly long 40-min subway ride away, which is just way too much time for two empty stomachs on a weekend morning.