Chun Guang Coconut Candy: A consultation prize after a bad Thai meal, this complimentary milky-white coconut-flavored hard candy has a mellow, creamy taste. More nutty than most coconut treats, sweet but not overpoweringly so. One of the best candies I've had in recent memory. 4.0/5.0
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Golden Steamer Pumpkin Bun: Golden Steamer epitomizes what I love about NYC. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, cash-only bao shop right off of Canal St on Mott in Chinatown, with sweet and savory offerings all around $1 each. The sizable buns can easily be a meal on its own, offering an incredible value. This lightly sweetened pumpkin bun has a eggy flavor and starchy, creamy layers of pumpkin paste towards the center. The bread is more dense than their white buns used in their savory baos (reviews forthcoming) but the bread st... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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PaTea Brown sugar oolong milk tea with boba: I really love living in NYC, but one thing that was missing for me was a mom-and-pop super-asian bubble tea shop, the kind that has an overwhelming number of flavors that isn’t a major chain like Gong Cha or Coco. Those types of shops are omnipresent in the Bay Area, but not so much here. However, that gap has now been filled by PaTea, a very small bubble tea shop a few blocks away from Union Square. There, they have the “chubby” bucket-sized bubble tea cups in a variety of milk and fruit te... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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Nature's Soy Black sesame soy milk: I love Asian soy milk, which tends to be a lot less sweet and taste of actual soybeans/tofu compared to American soymilk (there's a very good chapter on this in the book Organic inc.), so when I went to Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown NYC, I checked out the refrigerated, fresh soy milk options. This brand happened to have black sesame and matcha soymilk, two of my favorite flavors. Since the half gallons we're quite large and black sesame is a bit more unqiue for this category, I purchase... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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T. K. Foods Salted Egg Yolk Cookies: When my parents shared these Chinese salted egg yolk cookies with me and told me they were available at Costco, I was skeptical. Sure, Costco has a lot of Asian customers, but the idea of salted eggs as a sweet snack didn't strike me as having mass appeal. Fundamentally, though, eggs are a primary component of many baked goods, so if you think about it, the idea of a salted egg-based treat doesn't seem so foreign. These individually wrapped biscuits are flaky and buttery, easy yielding and c... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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Natural Idea Finger Pancakes - Seaweed Flavor: My friend SengMing brought me this snack, which he purchased from 99 Ranch, an Asian supermarket. Directly translate to "Finger Pancakes" (there is no English on the label), these miniature biscuits are irregularly shaped and really do look like pancakes, with the same kind of coloration ( a darker toasted brown on the edges) that you get when you actually make pancakes on the stovetop. The sweet and savory seaweed flavor is super tasty and distinct, with a much more concentrated taste of ... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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