Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao

Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao 
38-12 Prince St., Flushing, NY 11354 
(718) 321-3838

Growing up eating the best homecooked (Chinese) food by my Mom, I've become really picky and critical of Chinese food (the kind not cooked by my mom of course).  Often times Chinese restaurants fail to achieve delicate, rich flavors without all the oil and MSG.  Some of the best Chinese restaurants I've eaten at in fact were small family owned ones that really cared about what they served and tried their best to do real Chinese food justice.  So if you haven't gotten the message by now, I'm a fan of Chinese cuisine - when it's done right.  So when we visited Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, I was super excited.  It's a tiny little place that serves Shanghainese cuisine (my fave) in Queens (if you think Chinese food in Chinatown is good, you should probably take a trip to Flushing).  This little joint, Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao (now that's a mouthful... of tasty goodness) has some of the tastiest xiao long bao in Queens.  It's really easy to miss being that it's small, most of the outside sign is written in Chinese and trees cover most of the English part of the sign.  Inside the restaurant, there's a nice homey feel to it.  You feel like you're in a tiny noodle shop.  You can see the chefs working away, rolling dough, steaming dishes, and doing an assortment of things in the kitchen through a partial glass window.

The first dish we ordered was a Cucumber appetizer.  It's sort of a cold, pickled cucumber dish.  The cucumbers are usually marinated in and seasoned with some minced garlic, sesame oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, adn cilantro.  The dish was okay.  It was rather light/refreshing and was a perfect starter.  I wished the garlic flavor was more dominating, but in that case it would have probably killed and masked all the flavors of the dishes we were to eat afterwards.

The next dish was the Scallion Pancake with Sliced Beef.  Anything wrapped in a scallion pancake is just delicious.  The pancake itself was thick, crispy on the outside and warm and doughy on the inside.  Inside the pancake were thin slices of beef, scallions, and Hoisin sauce.  For some reason the dish kind of reminded me of the experience of eating Peking duck.  I guess mainly because the flavors of Hoisin sauce and scallions and the idea of meat wrapped in some kind of doughy sandwich.  I really enjoyed this dish mostly because of the scallion pancakes and strong flavors of the seasoning/garnish and less so because of the actual beef inside.

The followng dish was the Crispy Noodle with Shredded Pork.  I like this dish most of the time at most Chinese places because I really enjoy the contrast in textures.  The crispy pan-fried noodles are typically coated with a meat/vegetable sauce, leaving parts of the noodles crispy and other parts soft and savory.  This particular dish could have been fried a little bit less.  There was more crisp and less softness in the noodles throughout the dish.  Maybe we should have waited longer for the noodles to absorb some of the sauce and soften up.  However, I did like the sauce a lot.  By the time we reached the bottom of the dish, all there was left was the sauce and just the sauce.  You know when you finish a dish and notice the pool of oil separated from the sauce, sitting at the bottom of the dish and you instantly regret finishing every last bit of the dish?  Yeah, that didn't happen with this one.  It was oil-pool free, surprisingly enough.

By the time the xiao long bao finally came to our table, I was more than ready to rip into them.  But the wiser, more patient side of me kicked in and I knew better than to bulldoze through a xiao long bao.  Those of you who haven't had one yet, it's basically a soup dumpling.  They usually have a thin outer skin with some kind of meat filling bathing its own juices inside the dumpling skin.  If you try to conquer it in a quick, swift bite your tongue will make you pay for it as it simmers from the scalding hot juices inside the dumpling.  I have this special way of eating it.  I take a tiny bite of the skin on the top of the dumpling, creating a tiny vent hole.  I pour some vinegar/ginger sauce (that usually comes with the xiao long bao) through the hole.  I then wait for a few seconds for the juices and sauce to mingle.  Then, I slowly sip the soup from the opening, leaving just enough juices to coat the dumpling when I take a bite of it.  It seems complicated, but trust me - since I've started eating it that way I never burned my tongue again!  Okay, sorry for going off on a tangent.  Back to the dishes.  So our xiao long bao - we ordered the Steamed Pork Buns and also the Steamed Crabmeat and Pork Buns - finally came (6 of each)!  The Pork Buns were just just plain and the Crabmeat and Pork Buns were dabbed with a bit of yellow at the top.  Both were fantastic.  The soup was not overly salty or oily, but rather rich and savory.  The skin of the dumpling buns were thin and perfectly chewy.  It's hard to get the skin right most of the time - it's usually too hard and overly chewy.  The meat was moist and happily free of chunks of fat that you sometimes find in the meat of dumplings.

Even after the xiao long bao, we amazingly had room for some Pork and Vegetable Wontons in Spicy Sauce.  They were okay.  The skin was nice and chewy - you can tell that the dough of the skin was homemade.  The meat was a bit on the dry side.  The sauce was a mixture of some kind of peanut sauce, sesame oil, and spicy chili oil (?).

We also gave the Salted Bean Milk (I forgot the name but it was something like that).  I wasn't a big fan - I'm not used to having salty soy milk with slices of you tiao (a type of fried dough) floating inside.  Perhaps I didn't warm up to the dish because I was too full and the consistency and saltiness of it turned into an appetite suppressant.

Overall I liked this place.  It's very homey and hole-in-the-wall-ish.  The prices are also pretty decent.  -10/30/09

OVERALL RATING: * * *
FOOD: * * *
SERVICE: * *
AMBIANCE: * * *
VALUE: * * *

PROS:

• Everything is fresh and homemade
  

CONS:

• N/A
  

SUGGESTIONS:

• They don't take credit cards so don't forget the moolah
• Xiao Long Bao - the crabmeat ones
• Scallion Pancakes