Big Groups on a Budget

Ever since I joined ALESN, Saturday nights after class has become bonding time with fellow students and teachers. We typically go in a big group 10+ people, so finding a place in Chinatown has became sort of an art. Our mantra is find a place that is cheap and can fit all of us, the rest is whatever. After a semester, here are the places that I find to be good for group and your pockets:

X.O Taste

This is our most frequent stop because of their wide variety of menu (200+ items and counting) and spacious seating. The service is very quick and prompt too. I usually go here with a $5 budget and come home quite satisfied. My go-to item is this delicious Taiwanese-style pork steak with rice (and yes, only $5 for this humble plate of meat and starch (+hard boiled egg and a leave of veggie):

Congee Village

Don't expect a good service here. Everyone always ordered congee in our group, but the servers always fail to remember which congee is what or whose. The last time I was there, they ran out of you tiao too! Anyhow, the congee is alright. It comes in a small sauce-pan sort of thing. For the price ($5 average), the serving size is quite generous. My favorite item from here is Sampan Porridge, because I haven't found it elsewhere:

Feng Cheng Yuan

This place is actually right next door from Congee Village. Below-mediocre Chinese restaurant that has typical take-out items, just with plenty of seating and servers. I had this bowl that they call "Szechuan-style Noodle Soup", and oh please, not again. So much sprouts as opposed to the noodle, very little meat, and no taste at all:

Dessert Bonus: Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

Dessert time! Everyone who's taking the subway from Canal Street with me love to stop here for dessert. Their space is rather tiny, but don't underestimate their ice cream and the power of long line of customers waiting to be served. I totally love their exotic flavors that are rather hard to find elsewhere (lychee, pandan, ginger, green tea, red bean, and the like). Here's me posing with their dragon mascot and my pandan ice cream:

Late Post: Yumcha with ALESN at Jing Fong

After having such great meal, I do have a bad habit of going into a food coma, which can lead into forgetting to write about it. So here it is: a post about Jing Fong, over a week later :P

I finally found an awesome group in NYC called Asian Language Exchange and Social Network (ALESN). They have volunteer teachers teaching Asian language classes at the YMCA in Chinatown. I joined the Japanese I class and loving it so far! :) As a fundraising-slash-welcome-back event, we went out for yum cha at Jing Fong in Chinatown. We were supposed to meet at 10 in front of the restaurant and I was kinda confused because 1) Dim sum places in Philly aren't opened until 11 and 2) The building was half covered in duplex board because of the construction going on next door. Any how, the ALESN team managed to get up to the restaurant at 10:30 after gathering 16 people (we parted into 4 tables).

When I got up there, I was just so shocked because the place was HUGE. I swear it can hold 3 Chinese weddings all at once.

The service was out of the world. Servers were very quick in refilling our tea pot and checking on us to see if we had "enough to eat". For all the impatient people out there, there are also walk-up stations that you can go to (bring your card to be stamped) if you know what you want but not patient enough to wait for one of these wonderful aunties to come by with the carts.

And for us a table of 6, these were what we ordered. Food was so great, very close to what I had in the streets of Mong Kok, Hong Kong. The xiao long bao especially warmed my heart as it reminded me of that rainy night getting stuck at Universal Studio in Singapore (refer back to my travel blog if you want to know more about it).

  

  

  

And it was very reasonably priced, $72 for the whole table, $12 per person.

I'm totally coming back. I would most likely take any visiting friend/relative who comes to town in the future.