I returned to the 41-28 mall for lunch on Friday (see a pattern here?), determined to try another
unusual cuisine, that of Wenzhou. The easiest place to find Wenzhou
cuisine outside of China is said to be Paris, due to long standing
connections between Wenzhou and the French automobile industry, but I
decided Flushing would do for the moment. I ordered somewhat blindly,
as a couple of well-known Wenzhou dishes I had Googled up didn’t appear
to be on the menu, and ended up with a big bowl of noodle soup
plentifully seeded with fish "pellets", skinny fish cakes which themselves resembled
small fish. It was subtly seasoned and tasty, but not particularly
exciting.
After my noodle lunch I wandered upstairs in the mall and
discovered the Shandong Dumpling stall, and couldn’t resist sitting
down to a plate of freshly made shui jiao (boiled dumplings, for which
Shandong is famous). They were obvious cooked to order, not par-poiled,
due to the elapsed time, and the skins were classic but the filling a
bit on the dry and bland side. Another dumpling shop ion the basement level in the same mall offered better Shnadon dumplings when I tried them.













