A Fan Ti
Lamb liver, kidneys, and heart from A Fan Ti
Over three years of partially working for Food & Wine Magazine has turned me into somewhat of a foodie. Most recently, I gave into the massive hype surrounding Momofuku Ko, managed to get a reservation there, and spent a significant chunk of my stimulus check on a brilliant dinner. However, despite the hoity-toity origins of my young obsession with food, I've started going easy on my wallet and conscience (you can only spend so much on a meal before you start to feel guilty...).
New York is well known for its upscale restaurants but it's also known for the diversity of its people. With all those people come ethnic enclaves all around the city where you can find amazing food from every region of the world you can imagine. Most of these meals can be had for little over the price of the glass of orange juice I had for brunch in my neighborhood this morning.
Exploring regional cuisines has led me to visit areas of the city I would otherwise never have thought to explore. It's also taught me a lot about the various regions of different countries around the world, most notably those of Thailand and China. While it was always obvious that each country consists of many different cultures, just like the U.S., it really struck me yesterday.
Because it was a half day, some of my coworkers and I went out to Flushing, Queens to eat at a restaurant called A Fan Ti that we had read about online. One look at the menu will tell you that this place isn't your typical Chinese restaurant. It's almost all lamb and you can get just about any part of that lamb you want. Testicles, eyeballs, etc.
Unfortunately, when we got there, they no longer had the English menus. Everything was in Chinese so we stumbled through ordering via the limited Mandarin that the two Malaysians in our group spoke. What struck me was when we asked if they had any pork dishes they told us that they were a Muslim place and didn't sell pork.
Hearing this instantly made me feel really ignorant. I had never realized that there's a Muslim population in China and it left me feeling a little lost because suddenly there was a vast disconnect between what I thought I was going to be eating and what I was actually going to be eating. It's as if I were sitting in North Dakota enjoying Texas-style BBQ just thinking of it as "American food" while having no idea where Texas was or what it's like. Considering that China is such a huge country, it suddenly seemed like it was important to know the story behind what I was about to eat.
After the first shock, the hits just kept on coming, it turned out the employees and the owner were all actually Korean. I got the impression that they were ethnically Korean but from China. Many of the side dishes were very Korean but the main dishes definitely weren't and it's not the sort of neighborhood where a Korean guy with no cred can open a regional Chinese place and get away with it. After some reading on Chowhound, I learned that the food was Xinjiang to be more precise. Armed with the name of the region, I proceeded to spend the next hour or so reading about it, its food, and where else in Queens I need to go eat.
If you don't care about food, it can seem like people read into it too much when famous chefs like Anthony Bourdain go on about how food is so closely tied to a culture's personality and history, but it's true. What a culture eats is shaped by the environment they live in, their beliefs, taboos, history of interaction with other cultures, and everything else they've gone through since humans came into existence. There's a lot to learn from being open minded, eating everything, being curious about what you're eating, and being a dork like me and reading about it after the meal.
Here are photos of the rest of the meal at A Fan Ti:
Lamb Dumplings
Lamb Skewers. We ordered twelve more of these at the end of the meal.
Spicy Fish in broth. Very Sichuan-y, very delicious.
We felt like we should order vegetables of some sort...
