Flushing

I'm ashamed it's taken me 4 years in New York to finally venture out to Flushing to eat. I've gone a dozen times for baseball games but was simply too lazy to take the 40 minute ride out for delicious food. So I went last weekend with a friend, a fellow Californian, who's been craving some authentic, cheap Asian food. Unfortunately there isn't much of a Vietnamese community out here so there aren't too many decent places to go but luckily I love all Asian food and there are so many choices in Flushing. The minute I stepped off the train, I was smiling with sheer delight. Flushing reminded me exactly of home: wide streets, parking lots, malls, Asian stores, Asian restaurants. It was amazing.

With some recommendations from a friend, Yelp and my GPS, we were able to navigate around Flushing. Fortunately everything was located decently close so it wasn't hard. The streets and addresses are numbered very oddly though. Slightly confusing. Anyhow, on to the food!

spicy wontons from white bear. delish

taiwanese meatball--glutinous wrapper with meat and sauce. not a fan

before momofuku, there was the taiwanese pork bun!

 We ventured into the Flushing Mall, which is kind of a strange mall, and discovered the food court was great! 

sweet soy milk and chinese donut....it gets dipped into t he milk

pork noodles from xi'an famous foods

machine that made little cream filled pastries. minimum purchase was half a dozen so of course i got 6 just to try 1!

For a little breather from eating and to get some "exercise," we wandered into J Mart, a huge a$$ grocery store. I was in heaven. I think I wandered up and down every aisle just admiring the sheer variety of food products. I also snapped pictures of the most amusing ones I found.

i never knew winter melon was so big!

look at all the fresh seafood!

yummy

beef pizzle my nizzle

nothing is more comforting than a roasted black chicken?

insert inappropriate comment here

40 minutes later, I left with a bag of groceries and only $13 less in my wallet! Take that Whole Foods! After all that, we were ready for some dessert.

shaved ice with condensed milk and toppings from ice fire land

I honestly cannot wait to go back to Flushing and explore some more.

Live Octopus Spotted in Flushing

Last Friday, I ventured off the island and trekked out to Flushing for a meal with coworkers and friends. Yes, I did indeed mean to say trek because it was more than a hop, skip and jump away! Our two options for transportation were: subway/bus/walk or LIRR/walk. We opted for the LIRR despite it's slightly pricier ticket because it was supposed to get us closer to the restaurant. Let me just say the LIRR on a Friday evening is quite the poop show. I'm not familiar with certain stops only being accessible on specific cars of the train but our group had to get out of one end and sprint to the other end to be able to get off at our stop. Not quite sure why that was the case. Still doesn't make sense to me! We eventually made it to our destination, a popular Korean restaurant called Sik Gaek. My coworkers had wanted to come here to try live octopus seafood stew featured on a popular travel food show. I was weary but was curious to see everyone else try. It was an interesting experience to say the least.

some normal dishes: spicy rice cakes, marinates pork, mushroom skewers

the holy grail of seafood: everything came out fresh and raw and was steamed in the hot broth. note the big glop of octopus on top. the broth was very flavorful

I have to admit I was really grossed out by the wriggling bits of octopus. I'm all for trying new things but this was really hard to just pop in my mouth. I let it die a bit more before I attempted. It didn't taste like much and didn't have any real flavor. It was chewy and cold. Not sure I would recommend it or even try it again.

Overall, it was a great restaurant and tons of fun to go with a big group. We had watermelon soju which was served out of a big hollowed out watermelon. It was delicious and could have led to one of "those" nights but fortunately did not. The service was very friendly and attentive. We even got a big platter of oysters on the house!