Nan Xiang Dumpling House Visited 1/28/11 3.5 Forks

Nan Xiang Dumpling House 38-12 Prince St, Flushing, NY 11354

 One of my great regrets is that I do not eat in Queens enough.  It's probably got the greatest number of true ethnic eats in the 5 boroughs and is known of cheap authentic eats.  As an Asian, it's probably criminal that I don't know where to eat in Flushing.  So when Dan suggested we have dinner in Flushing, I had to ask around for a good place to eat.  The problem is that almost every place in Flushing probably beats most Chinese places in the city.  A friend of mine had recommended this place and it was also listed in the NY Times "Great Eating in Flushing" article, so I thought it was worth a try.  

The decor is kind of your typical Chinese place: not very nice.  We sat at a table where there were brown spots on the wall next to us, but at a base level the table and utensils were at least clean.  I know that many Yelp reviews complained of slow service, but I experienced the total opposite.  They whisked us to a table, gave us menus, tea, and asked if we were ready to order in about 5 minutes.  Of course we had to order the Xiao Long Bao (soup dumplings) but when I tried to order in Chinese the waitress looked me like I was speaking another language.  She made me feel really self-conscious about my pronunciation, so much so that I just ended up ordering everything in English (maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was with the only non-Asian person the whole restaurant??). This is how people like me get scared into never speaking Chinese ever again. We also got the jellyfish, scallion pancake with beef, and crispy noodles with pork.  The jellyfish came out in 2 minutes because it was basically sitting out in the buffet-style table in the front of the restaurant.  This dish was a miss...I remember jellyfish being pretty smooth in texture but crunchy and tart.  This was tart but it had this weird rough texture.  I think I freaked Dan out a bit by ordering this and I tried to convince him it was good, but now that I think about it, I didn't really like it that much.  The xiao long bao came out next...there were 6 in one order and piping hot.  The skin was pretty thin and I liked the flavor of the soup inside and the pork filling.  I forget how messy it is to eat these things and I was spraying soup all over the table.  I thought they were pretty good but Dan seemed to have an issue with what he calls "booby trap" food.  He didn't seem to be a fan of biting into something only to have hot soup pouring out of it.  Ha, silly American. The dish that we both loved was the scallion pancake with beef.  It wasn't your typical thin, crispy pancake.  This was very thick but still crispy on the outside.  However, it was the hoisin sauce and beef on the inside that was yummy.  There were 3 to one order and I wish there was 4 just so we didn't have to split the last one. The last dish was the crispy noodles with shredded pork...it's basically your typical Chinese dish covered in a thick brown sauce.  It was good, but it had too much cabbage and not enough pork or straw mushrooms (one of my favorite mushrooms).  All in all, we were full and had a good meal but in retrospect given that Flushing isn't the easiest place to get to, I wish we had gone to a place with more variety or a seafood restaurant.  But the best part of going to a place like this was the bill: $23 total for two.  Cash only.