Hawkers Visited 8/14/10 3.5 Forks

Hawkers  225 E 14th St, (between 3rd Ave & 2nd Ave), New York, NY 10003

Dan and I had tried to go to Ippudo for the 500th time, but even at 6:45pm on a Saturday there was over an hour wait and I just couldn't justify that.    I had just read about Hawkers in Time Out, so we thought that we would give it a try. 


I have always envied SE Asia for their abundance of street food, so I liked this concept of bringing those foods to NYC.  The space is pretty narrow, so I think the long communal table was probably the only way to go in the restaurant.  I wasn't a huge fan of the red walls, it kind of made everything too dark, but I appreciated the funky street vibe they were going for. 


They have a list of about 10 snacks in the front and then they have a variety of fried rice, noodle and other dishes in the back.  Dan and I split the duck buns, pork rolls, shrimp rolls, and drunken noodles.  The service was very friendly...almost too friendly! They kept asking how we were but forgot to ever give us any glasses of water!  The appetizers came out relatively quickly.  The duck buns were  a la Chinese style with hoisin sauce and scallions. It was pretty good, but I would have liked a bit more duck (and some crispy skin) in there, there was only 1 piece in it, but the one piece was moist and tasty.  The shrimp rolls were thin fried rolls with a mayo chili sauce and I thought they were quite good...you could really taste the shrimp and they weren't over fried tasting, which is what happens in some place. The pork rolls were a bit weird.  They tasted fine but the presentation needs a bit of help.  It just looked a bit messy looking.  It was essentially a pork sausage wrapped  in thinly fried skin.  Maybe it is a common style in parts of SE Asia that I'm not familiar with but it just looked like of unattractive, but taste wise worked well.


We then waited a bit long for the drunken noodles, but it wasn't so long that I was going to pass out.  When the dish came, it was just the right size for sharing.  The noodles were perfectly cooked (very moist with the right amount of heat to it) and the chicken was nicely grilled.  It had really good flavor to it and I quite enjoyed it.  We also got 3 beers and our total bill was $28/pp without tip.  I think that's a bit high considering it's "street" food and if we were to get these same dishes on the street our bill would probably be half, but since we were in a sit-down restaurant, I guess I shouldn't expect it to be much cheaper.