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Excellent Dumpling House
by Bill KerrWe had about six angry Chinese immigrants screaming at each other and us in Cantonese. The Second our plates arrived, the check slid across the table with a flick of the wrist from our brow-furrowed waitress. I had ordered beef with broccoli over rice for $4.30, which came with hot and sour soup and a fried dumpling on the side, and was out the door in 15 minutes.
My first experience at Excellent Dumpling House, a shack on the corner of Canal and Lafayette streets was unlike any restaurant experience I have ever had. Complete strangers were placed together at ten-person tables, food was prepared and served at mercurial speeds and the wait staff was always in a bad mood.
Next year, I will begin repaying an over $100,000 debt, the price of attending graduate school at NYU. I am conscious of this looming loan every time I buy a newspaper or a packet of gum - just another dollar I will be paying interest on. My friend Brendan, a 26-year-old cartoon artist and student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is in a similar situation. He quit his job in order to commute to school full time via the Long Island Railroad. Every subway swipe and vending machine purchase is mentally tabulated.
So, in the hopes of fending off starvation without being reduced to dumpster diving, we set out to find a meal in Manhattan for a fistful of singles. Excellent Dumpling House, where the adventurous patron can get a full stomach on $3, has become our headquarters in Lower Manhattan. I eat there as much during the week as I can stomach. Chinese food is unique in its flavoring from any other food I have experienced - I’m never quite sure what the mystery spice was or how they manage to morph the beef to have that consistency and taste.
I found the place when I was on the first assignment for my “Chinatown beat,” and in many ways the shop has become an analogy for my entire neighborhood. Its dizzying speeds, multilingual shouting and diverse clientele are all representations of Chinatown. Every time I walk out of the door of my apartment, I witness basically the same scene, only without the fortune cookie. Past places that I have lived all had their own personality, but Chinatown is unique in that it exists as its own Petri dish in New York; while there is obviously the Chinese influence that the name suggests, the area is full of a wide array of ethnic flavors, from the West Africans that sell fake Rolexes, blast hip hop music and start impromptu dance circles on the street to the Afghanis who cook kababs and make falafel sandwiches from their street carts, the distinctive sent lingering down the block. Much like when I order beef with broccoli at Excellent Dumpling House, I’m never quite sure what I am going to get when I walk out of my front door.
I live on Canal Street, on the border of Chinatown and Tribeca, so I often go to Excellent Dumpling House alone, and every available Friday with Brendan. In my area, the closest supermarket is over a dozen blocks away, and grocery-bought meals average $10 a meal.
Brendan is bent on ordering a new dish every week. I have found that result can be achieved by ordering the same thing every time – they are just going to ignore me and serve whatever the hell they want to anyway. I order beef with broccoli; I might as well say meat and vegetable/other meat. Beef interchanged with chicken, tofu, shrimp and pork; broccoli replaced by baby carrots, fried dumplings, steamed cabbage and pan
-fried octopi. There’s only so much I can take before the feeling of Canal Street starts to wash down my throat along with the Wonton soup. It’s hard to understand what I mean by this until you see the roving cyclones of trash swirl around here after a particularly busy day for the street vendors. Living on the street has made me intensely skeptical of any product sold there. Sometimes, the vision of what garbage strewn across Canal Street looked like a couple hours into the New Year’s Parade pops into my head while I’m eating. I manage to swallow my bean sprouts anyway, occasionally suppressing a gag reflex or two.
Still, there is not much alternative. The areas around Chinatown, aka SoHo and Tribeca, aren’t exactly known for their bargains, food or otherwise. When I first moved into the area, I went out to lunch with my girlfriend and shelled out $8 for a hot dog, fries not included. Going out to dinner, I am hard pressed to find a place with entrees under $20, unless those meals come with the “super size” option.
As one can probably image, I am a regular customer now at Excellent Dumpling House. Not that this changes the level of service; the servers still look me over like I’m planning to steal something, I still get new and creative versions of beef with broccoli and the speed couldn’t get any faster this side of the space-time continuum anyway. With at least one more semester before I can start collecting a steady paycheck, there’s no doubt that I will keep coming back. I might never eat take-out Chinese again after NYU, but at least I’ll have a good excuse when someone asks why I’m passing on the beef with broccoli.
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billkerr |
Latest page update: made by billkerr
, Apr 26 2007, 2:01 PM EDT
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