I'm a Giant in Chinatown

Please forgive me. Several weeks have passed since I took these pictures from the Taste of Chinatown. It's about time I blogged about the food festival. It was a warm, Saturday afternoon and I was with a motley collection of friends. We zig-zagged through the crowd and fought our way over to the street-side tables, where $1 and $2 tasting portions were offered to the crowd. There were no tables, so overly hungry eyes could mean juggling several Styrofoam containers while eating standing up and walking through the crowd. (Sure, there were a couple chair-less tables scattered down the center of the street, but these were rarely open for occupation.)

Fried rice and pork dumplings were the first selection for which we fought, and for $2, we received quite a respectable portion. I shoveled rice into my mouth straight from the small container as we continued to scope out more food. The Peking Duck place looked amazing, and the line around the block confirmed our suspicions. In the end though, we were not motivated enough to wait (I will be going back for this, mmmm duck).


We visited this table next for a collection of egg rolls, steamed pork bao, fried shrimp, and these little pork burger-things which throughly confused me. The shrimp was quite tasty, but certainly unremarkable, and I really wasn't a fan of the bao. It seemed a little too gooey on the outside for my taste. At this point, my friends and I were already too full and wanting to get out of the sun. We slipped into a bakery/tea shop/karaoke club for bubble tea. If you are not privy to the magic of bubble tea, it's basically a fruity frozen drink with little balls of tapioca which you suck up through the straw while drinking and chew. This shop had a really nifty machine that seals the top of frozen bubble tea with a film of plastic, and can be punctured with the over-sized straw. Fun fun.


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