Reader: The City’s Dim Sum Sucks. But Here Are the Places I Like!
We recently heard from our friend Francis Lam, a connoisseur of Chinese food who had some intriguing things to say in response to our post on the wooing of Chinatown Brasserie’s Joe Ng by Bensonhurst restaurateurs.
“Frankly speaking, the dim sum I know of in the city just doesn’t match up to the best stuff in Hong Kong and Vancouver. What you can get in those and other places is much more in line with Joe Ng’s work at Chinatown Brasserie, which I would definitely call head and shoulders above anything else here. (Secretly, I’m glad he’s being headhunted back to a Chinese community in Brooklyn, where it will be more affordable and the product turnover will be higher.)”
Okay, Francis. So where do you get decent dim sum in the city?
The New York Diet
The Punk-Rock Diet
Handsome Dick Manitoba, lead singer of New York proto-punk greats the Dictators, helped launch the CBGB scene in the mid-seventies; Saturday night, when his band plays the club’s next-to-last show, he’ll be marking the end of an era. Unlike many of their punk-rock peers, who were more into drugs than food, the Dictators were “gourmandizers” (according to CB’s founder Hilly Kristal, at least). Handsome Dick Manitoba shared some memories of the punk-era East Village eats scene (and outer-borough fast-food scene), plus where he chows now that he’s got a “lot of money.”
