Weird Food From Chinatown (With Pictures!)

Saturday, Girlfriend and I attended the Taste of Chinatown celebration here in New York. While I certainly am a fan of Chinatown as a whole, I'm sad to say that the event it's self, where area restaurants set up outdoor stalls and hawk their wares for 1-to-2 dollars in a bid to drum up business and/or give everyone in the city food poisoning, was a decidedly mixed bag. For one thing, the whole "we're giving away the goods for only one dollar" thing was bullshit. Yes, there were a few things there for a dollar, but it was mostly stuff you wouldn't put in your mouth to gain acceptance into a fraternity. Five words: Dried fish on a stick. Yeah, no thanks. All of the so-called "good" items were two bucks and even then, most were not really worth the money. Let me break it down for you:

The Good

Veggie Lo-Mein - Greasy as all hell, but flavorful and chock full of onions and carrots. A deal at twice the price.

Spicy, Fried Malaysian Dumpling Thingy - Don't know what it was called but, seriously, yum. It was this pastry sort of affair, stuffed with potatoes, green peas and a whole buttload of spices. The one I had was damn fiery, but not so much that it overwhelmed the flavor. Need to find out what these were called, because they're pretty much the perfect thing to accompany a night of drinking beer.

Crab Rangoon - If you're not familiar with the magic of Crab Rangoon, then you're letting the best things in life pass you by while you lay on the couch eating Cheez-Its. Cheez-Its are great, don't get me wrong, but listen: We're talking a fried wonton, stuffed with cream cheese, onion and crab meat, here. If that sounds weird to you, offensive to your palate, then you're going to simply have to trust that I would never steer you wrong. Close your eyes and leap, friend, because the Crab Rangoon are waiting to kick your taste bud's asses.

The Bad

Peking Duck - Peking duck is awesome. Peking duck that's being sold on the street for two dollars... not so much. All I'm sayin' is that the pieces we were given had a distinct "leftover-y" taste to them.

Death Pastry - I assume that's not it's real name, but it applies none the less. It looked like an eclair, sans the chocolate, and it tasted like someone suffocated a fish to death with a large wad of low-quality whipped cream. Girlfriend and I each took one bite, one, and spit it out. Girlfriend nearly horked all over the subway station, so foul was this item.

The Weird

Malaysian Corn Jello - I don't know what else to call it. It was brightly colored, creamy-looking pieces of gelatin that tasted exactly like creamed corn. It wasn't awful or anything; if you like creamed corn, it was just fine. It was, however, exceedingly odd.

Lotus Leaves-Wrapped... Uh... Stuff - We got this thing that was, we were told, a delicacy of rice, meat, egg, green beans and other junk wrapped in lotus leaves. It was as heavy as a cinder block, tightly bound, and it looked like this:



Girlfriend said, here, eat this. I regarded the package with suspicion, as if to say, "Weird Chinese food, say what???":



I unwrapped it and it looked like this. Or in other words, kind of glassy, scary and pod-like:



Before a creature could slither from it and clamp it's self to my face, I stabbed it with a fork:



There was some sort of meat in there, also what was once an egg. There were no beans or anything else like that. Just the sticky, unpleasant outer layer of rice, the mystery meat (my money's on those little turtles they sell all over Chinatown), and the gritty, mealy egg. Out of a sense of following through, I took a bite:

It was both bland and horrid, like a porridge made from roadkill. I took a few more bites, just to be sure that I was correct in my original assumption of meh. I was. In the end, I was so disappointed with the experience that I went slightly out of focus for a split-second:

Luckily, we were able to catch it all on film.