Gothamist has dined in all kinds of joints in Flushing’s Chinatown – killer Cantonese, top-flight dim sum and lamb-laden Northern Chinese. The area we haven’t explored much is the food courts, mazes of stalls so diverse that Tony Bourdain could easily cull material for an episode or two. It’s not that we are squeamish, it’s just that the signs are all in Chinese and many of the proprietors speak little English. A non-Chinese speaker would need a Rosetta Stone of sorts.
Thanks to a Chowhound thread we found such a tool: a translation of a Sichuan food stall menu. Armed with some printouts we headed off to the Golden Shopping Mall on Main Street.
The man running the show at stall No. 31 didn't look surprised when we shoehorned ourselves into a table next to his prep area and began looking through the cheat sheet. Thanks to the Chowhound buzz, he'd probably seen this dozens of times before. Gothamist ordered two cold dishes: Chengdu noodles and chuanbei rice noodles. To round things out with some protein, we also got the double-cooked pork.
The blocky chuanbei noodles were awash in a peppery sauce spiked with black vinegar and Sichuan peppercorns, which cause a tingly numb sensation. They weren't really noodles, but floppy long blocks of rice gelatin. The tangle of Chengdu noodles were more satisfying. Once mixed with the reddish ma la sauce they were also much spicier. The sauce was teeming with so many Sichuan peppercorns that our lips were vibrating. The cool slippery chuanbei came in handy to ease this sensation. The meaty strips of belly in the double-cooked pork were quite tasty. Although they were also swimming in a ma la sauce, it was nowhere near as palate-numbingly intense as the Chengdu noodles.
A food handling certificate listed the stall’s name as Chengdu Gourmet, which makes sense since Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan. However, we’ve seen the name translated as Chengdu Heaven. To get to the bottom of the matter, we e-mailed a friend who translated it as “Chengdu Heavenly Snacks.” He also told us that the place also offers hotpot and spicy ma la soup.
Yesterday afternoon we paid the joint another visit and ordered the spicy soup, or ma la tan, and a cold pig’s foot. The steaming bowl of soup was packed with so many things it might as well have been a hotpot. Crunchy seaweed knotted into bows, slippery Chinese glass noodles, firm chunks of dark-edged tofu, frilly black fungi, cabbage, daikon, bits of leaf tripe and a slices of lotus root made for a riot of textures and flavors. The broth was so intensely spicy that we were soon happily sweating and slurping away. So what if there was barely a fleck of meat in it? No worries; that pig foot we ordered turned out to be half a smoked duck, since we pointed to the wrong item on our crib sheet.
Chengdu Heavenly Snacks, Stall 31, Golden Shopping Mall, 41-28 Main St., Flushing
