Details: Located at 136-45 41st Ave, Flushing, NY 11355. Official site is https://www.alley41.com/
Alley 41 is a somewhat trendy Szechuan restaurant in Flushing. Szechuan is a region in China that mostly focuses on spicy food. Specifically, they have a lot of food that has that numbing type of spicy you get from a kind of peppercorn.
Details: Located at Golden Mall, 41-28 Main St., Flushing, NY 11355.
Came here with a friend. I’ve eaten in the mall before, but I generally hate eating in such a cramped, dirty basement. He didn’t care and wanted dumplings anyways.
There are many other establishments in here, mostly hand pulled noodle and hotpot places. Tianjin is just a dumpling and cold dishes place though. They have a variety of boiled dumplings priced at five to six dollars for twelve dumplings. For the most part, boiled dumplings generally taste the same regardless of what’s in them. Just meat and vegetables mostly in these dumplings.
The other thing they do here are the cold side dishes. They have things like tofu, pig ears, pig tongue, sausage, some kind of organ and some other stuff I can’t recall. A lot of it is drenched in the same spicy, numbing red oil. I generally love this stuff, even though it gives me indigestion. This is still true despite my dislike of spicy food. The spicy oil isn’t too spicy and the numbing effect is just mild enough to enjoy.
As for service and ambiance… well its a basement, with stools, broken tiles, and all manned by a single person behind the counter. There are other people there, but mainly one person does all the work of interacting with customers.
Score: 6/10 In regards to ordering, the menu hangs off a wall and is written in English. As for the cold dishes, you can just point at them as they are on display.
Official site: http://xianfoods.com/
This place used to be a hole in the wall, downstairs, inside a mall where absolutely no one paid their taxes. That was before Anthony Bourdain paid it a visit. Xi’an Famous Foods has since exploded and opened a number of successful store fronts inside the city.
I went to the one in downtown Flushing, a block down from the original location. Mostly because it’s slightly nicer with better seating.
The food consist of mainly two things: noodles and the lamb burger. There are also some cold appetizers like cucumbers. Almost everything is spicy. Including the cucumbers.
As an aside, I hate spicy food.
If you can get over the fact that Anthony Bourdain came here, then you’d find that the food is between mediocre to crappy. It’s authentic, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it. In fact, there are many locations which do the same kind of food around Flushing and Chinatown. This place is mostly for people who like spicy food and noodles. The burger was good though, very fatty.
Score: 3/10 As someone who hates spicy food, this place can be scored no higher. I feel like you could get the same quality of food if you added a bottle of Sriracha to cup noodles. Yes, the noodles were chewy. That is not enough to make me want to come back.
Pelicana is a Korean fried chicken chain headquartered in Korea. The one I went to was in Queens. Its identical to other Korean fried chicken chains like Bon Chan and Mad For Chicken. They do regular sized chicken and wing sized.
We ordered three types of chicken. While there are numerous flavors of chicken on the menu, there are in reality only two flavors: spicy and not spicy. And varying degrees in between. I hate spicy food so the non spicy, soy flavored chicken is pretty good. I tried one of their spicy ones and that hurt big time. They also have fries, mozzarella stick, onion rings, etc.
Score: 7.5/10 Good place for fried chicken and beer. If you have a choice between an American fried chicken place and a Korean fried chicken place, always pick Korean fried chicken. Its better. Far better.
Official site: http://www.pelicana.co.kr/global/english/
Muse Bank 