A volunteer group of young Asian professionals is self-publishing a book that includes recipes and stories from New York City's sprawling and diverse Asian food scene.
"Made Here," out Monday, is part cookbook, part history lesson and part love letter to the city's Asian communities. The group Send Chinatown Love says proceeds will go towards its efforts to help small businesses as well as its Gift-a-Meal program for low-income residents.
A turnip cake recipe from a decades-old dim sum banquet hall in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown is included alongside other selections from an upstart rice wine brewery in Greenpoint and a no-frills Korean-Chinese spot in East Flushing.
Photo of "Made Here" book cover.
The book, subtitled “Recipes & Reflections From NYC's Asian Communities,” features recipes and stories from 43 culinary establishments from over 24 neighborhoods, chosen by its editors to reflect the diversity of the city's Asian restaurants across cuisines, cultures, ages, and boroughs.
“We are trying to celebrate New York City’s culinary buku melting pot,” said editor Christoph Tsang-Grosse. ”That immigrant pathways can create in terms of cuisine–and how that's disseminated, across a city, across the country.”
Send Chinatown Love launched during the height of the pandemic to funnel donations to hard-hit restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It’s picked up steam since.
From Thai Diner, featured in "Made Here."
The fledgling group—which includes about 40 to 50 active members—is a part of a new generation of community organizations, some emerging during the height of the pandemic, that aim to preserve the history, culture, and affordability in the gentrifying Manhattan community.
Even as the city’s Asian population rapidly grows—accounting for more than half the city’s net growth of 629,415 residents over the last decade—the number of Asian residents in the historic neighborhood continues to contract as new “satellite Chinatowns” emerge in Queens and elsewhere in the city.
We are trying to celebrate New York City’s culinary buku melting pot.
With many of the businesses they work with recovered from a pandemic-era dip, Send Chinatown Love has since expanded to help long-time restauranteurs across the city reach more customers and stay afloat long-term, with new websites, menu designs, and social media accounts.
Net proceeds from “Made Here” sales go to the group, which uses the money to help small businesses, through its development services and Gift-a-Meal program for low-income residents.
Gothamist sat down with some of the editors and creators of Made Here to discuss their process and goals for the book. Here's what to know.
What’s in the book?
The book includes a range of recipes for dumplings, buns, snacks, noodles, rice dishes, stir-fries, sweets, and drinks from different local restaurants. Among the collection are the storied turnip cakes from the Golden Unicorn dim sum parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and scallion pancake P.E.C. (plantain, egg and cheese) tacos from the hit pop-up Forsyth Fire Escape in the Lower East Side that started with the owners serving burritos by lowering them in a bucket off their fire escape.
Cho Dang Gol, featured in "Made Here."
Each recipe is accompanied by a description of the dish and its history, along with intimate profiles of the restaurant it came from–and brightly-colored photographs of the mentioned food, people, and places.
The tome also includes sections on the history of different Asian neighborhoods, including in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Flushing, Jackson Heights, and Elmhurst. It also tells the story of the specialized farmers supplying the city’s Asian produce like bok choy and lychee. And it starts with a guide on small retailers across the city—including a homemade tofu stall, Filipino grocery stores, and a farm share for East Asian crops—to buy ingredients across the city and even parts of upstate New York.
How were the restaurants chosen?
The group knew it would fall short of a “comprehensive representation” of the city’s many Asian restaurants, or anything close to it, according to a cookbook FAQ on Send Chinatown Love’s Instagram page. But they aimed to capture “even a glimpse” of the city’s diverse Asian culinary scene, according to the Instagram post.
"That's the beauty of New York City and the Asian culinary community therein--that it's so expansive," said Tsang-Grosse. "This book could have been thousands of pages."
Elaine Mao, the editorial director, said they began by contacting dozens of restaurants that Send Chinatown Love had worked with before. The pool expanded with extensive research, even up until the last few months, to find restaurants with different stories and locations that editors thought should be represented in the final book.
Bodhi Kosher Vegetarian, featured in "Made Here."
Mao, Tsang-Grosse, and the rest of the roughly 30-person book team are also volunteers, working on the book in their spare time and hours carved out of their usual workdays. Tsang-Grossesays his day job is in advertising, and Mao works full-time as a software engineer at the music platform Pandora.
The roughly 30-person book team was also predominantly "women-led" and of Asian heritage, including those who identify as Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Malaysian, and Singaporean volunteers, according to the book's managing director Alice Luo. Tsang-Grosse says he's mixed-race, with Cantonese and German parents, and Mao says she identifies as Chinese American.
What's the goal of the book?
The book isn’t a guide or canon of the best Asian restaurants in the city, the editors said. Tsang-Grosse and Mao said they intended the book as an invitation for readers to more deeply connect with the city’s diverse Asian businesses–restaurants never visited, storefronts fleetingly passed in busy commutes, and beloved joints they frequent regularly.
“A lot of these times, we'll go to a neighborhood like Chinatown or Koreatown, or we'll walk past a random [store], and you just get a very superficial idea of what that's about,” Mao said. “And you don't really get the story behind it.”
In the process of creating the book, Mao said she learned about Asian diasporas little-known to the wider American audiences, and the history behind restaurants with fusion cuisines from their mixed-race owners.
Northern Wang Mandoo, featured in "Made Here."
Mao pointed to Northern Wang Mandoo, a Chinese-Korean spot in East Flushing, whose pork and Kimchi dumplings are included in the book. The owner Jinglan “Kay” Quan said she often hears complaints that her food isn’t “authentic.” But her menu is true to the cuisine she had growing up, as an ethnically Korean person in a region of southeastern China where many Korean immigrants migrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“That was a whole history that I had no idea about,” Mao said.
What are some of the restaurants in the book that exemplify the diversity of the city's Asian food scene?
The cookbook mentions a range of old-school classics and young newcomers alike. But even some individual restaurants alone defy traditional notions of “authenticity”-- a word often paid as a compliment to immigrant dishes, and one that repeatedly came up in behind-the-scenes conversations while making the book, Mao said.
“It's almost a complete fallacy to think about there being some pure platonic ideal of this particular cuisine or this food that is the most ‘authentic,’” Mao said.
It’s “one of the most boring things you can say about food,” she added, saying some of the most exciting developments in the food scene come from chefs trying to challenge traditional notions of authenticity.
Photo from Northern Wang Mandoo, featured in "Made Here."
Mao pointed to the Vietnamese-Mexican restaurant Falansai on the border of Bushwick and East Williamsburg, started by a half-Vietnamese, half-Mexican chef who grew up in Chicago.
“There's just all these influences ... why not use them if you have them, right?” Mao said.
And there are some restaurants mentioned that exemplify the "inevitable cross pollination that occurs in this pressure cooker of forced proximity" in New York City, as they wrote in the book's foreword. Like Golden Diner in the Lower East, with a breakfast egg sandwich inspired by another at a century-old Little Italy bakery , and Thai Diner in Nolita, where massaman curry-smothered fries pay homage to fries from the now-shuttered Ukrainian diner Odessa in the East Village.
Where can you buy the book?
The book is available on the Send Chinatown Love website, and also in select independent bookstores in New York City, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Copies will also be available at the book’s launch party on Monday, 7 to 10 p.m. at Red Pavillion, an Asian-owned neo-noir cabaret club in Bushwick. Tickets are sold out, but there’s a waitlist on Eventbrite.
