chinatown food tour

I don't have many pictures to show of the three-stop, five-dish tour of NYC's Chinatown that Amanda took me on on a rainy Thursday in June, mostly because I was too busy stuffing my face. But I'll tell you all about it. We met at the corner of Canal and Mott and stuck to Mott Street for our restaurants (food gold!). We were somewhat hampered by my too-early start time of 10:00 in the morning -- lots of places weren't open yet, so we were forced to do dessert as one of our first two dishes. Pictured above, spam and egg sandwich on Hong Kong-style white bread and French toast stuffed with house-made peanut butter served with maltose for dipping, both at Cha Chan Tang. We followed this up with shrimp dumplings and pork ribs at Mandarin Court, and then, just when we thought there was barely room for anything else, we went to a cart just up Mott from Hester and got delicious and cheap-as-hell portions of doughy pork noodles with a peanutty sauce and a bit of kick. We ate as much as we could of the noodles while standing under a storefront awning to protect us from the drizzle and then were forced to throw away the rest -- but at $1.25 a pop, we figured we were in the clear.