one of the greatest things about new york city, and i’m sure any major city in the world, is that there are small microcosms within that conjure up an entirely different time and place. main street flushing is one of those places. within its 15 square blocks you almost exclusively surrounded by the sounds, and sights, of mainland, urban, china (well, minus the increased car chaos). this is very different from what it is like in a “chinatown”, primarily because flushing does not care about tourism and selling those ubiquitous red lanterns you see in every chinatown shop.
grace and i go to flushing pretty often and one of our stops is almost always a tiny stall in the flushing mall’s food court. for $4 you can get a roasted pork ramen with hand pulled noodles. and by “hand-pulled noodles” i don’t mean some quaint style of pre-prepared noodle. i mean “pull off a chunk of dough and stretch it multiple times until it is as thin as spaghetti right before your very eyes”.
dropped in a pool of hot broth, the noodles are ready in a couple minutes and served garnished with your choice of meat or vegetables. i prefer roast pork and cilantro.
the only downside to the whole experience is that i cannot speak any language other than english. it is embarrassing, to say the least and, my father will never cease to remind me, extremely short-sighted. even though one of my resolutions this year is to learn spanish, it will still get me nowhere in asking for hand-pulled noodles. usually i just point and motion, but on this particular trip there was no one in sight with my preferred meal and i ended up trying to explain what i wanted through many misunderstandings. so instead of hand-pulled noodles, i got hand-sliced noodles, which was equally fascinating. a great log of dough was brought out and a sharp knife was used to slice thin sections off the log and into the broth.
in addition to the ramen, we also got some pork buns, cream buns and bubble tea. all in all, a successful day for eating.
Flushing Mall
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