There are a million Chinese places all over New York City. If you sit in any room in this town long enough, a Chinese menu will magically appear from beneath the door. The food that you can pick up or have delivered ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Chinatown is the home of some of the city's top markets. The Chinese housewives who patronize these places on a daily basis are as discriminating as the Parisiens and demand only the freshest and best ingredients. Markets that offer less do not last long. You can walk
down nearly any street in Chinatown and find incredible fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat and poultry, to say nothing of ingredients that are unknown to most people from this hemisphere. And the prices are usually the best you can find anywhere in the city.
The most memorable Chinese take out I've ever experienced, is -- as you might expect -- something that you really can't get anywhere else but in Chinatown, where the windows are filled with barbequed dead animals --everything from pigs and cows to squids (and perhaps space aliens) hanging by their necks. It was one of those ducks, slow-cooked as only the Chinese know how to do with crispy mahogany colored skin and impossibly tender and juicy meat. Why wasn't it fatty and greasy like most ducks? Only the Chinese butchers know. Anyway, Arlene and I saw it in the window of a hole-in-the-wall joint, took it home and ate the whole thing. So far we haven't done this again. We are afraid it was just a dream.
SUN QUAN JAN, INC.
79 Mulberry Street
Between Canal and BayardHope it's as good for you as it was for us!
UPDATE: The last time Arlene and I were in Chinatown we walked down Mulberry street and looked for this place. There was no sign that it have ever existed -- like Brigadoon it had vanished back into the mist. Because we believe in magic we figure that maybe one day we'll be walking down another Chinatown street and find it again.
