The Flushing Food Crawl

The 7 train is the best restaurant reservation in New York, and it doesn’t take reservations. You get on at Times Square, you ride the elevated tracks out past Woodside and Corona while the whole city rearranges itself below you, and twenty-some minutes later the train dead-ends at Main Street, Flushing. That’s it. That’s the trip. My husband and I have made it more Saturdays than I can account for, usually on a cold one when we want to eat until we can’t, and it has never once let us down.

Here’s the part that makes me a little crazy every year.

From late August into September, thousands of people ride this exact same line to the US Open, get off one stop early at Mets-Willets Point, and pay nine dollars for an ice cream cone and God knows what for a lobster BLT inside the stadium. The best Chinese food in the country is sitting two stops down the track. Same train. Same fare. A lobster BLT versus a whole afternoon of soup dumplings and hand-ripped noodles. It’s not a close call.

So this is my Flushing crawl. Five stops, all within a ten-minute walk of the Main Street station, nothing over twenty bucks a person, and every single one of them worth the ride on its own. Do it in order or don’t. Just come hungry, bring cash, and pace yourself. That last part is easier said than done, and I have failed it every single time.

One thing to know before you go. Flushing is the biggest Chinatown in New York, bigger than Manhattan’s, and it is not a theme park version of one. The signs are in Mandarin first and English maybe. The menus are long and sometimes handwritten. Nobody is going to hold your hand. That’s exactly why the food is this good and this cheap, and it’s why I love bringing first-timers here and watching the moment it clicks for them. You are not a tourist here. You’re just hungry, same as everyone else on the block.

Stop One. DunHuang, for hand-pulled Lanzhou noodles

Start where the dough gets stretched by hand in front of you. DunHuang Lanzhou Beef Noodle at 136-21 37th Avenue is a few minutes’ walk from the Main Street station, and it does the noodles of Lanzhou, the northwestern Chinese city that basically invented the art of pulling a single lump of dough into a bowlful of strands. Watch the cook whip and fold and slap it against the counter until it becomes noodles. It never stops being a small miracle. You order at the counter, you grab a table, you wait for a steaming bowl.

Get the classic Lanzhou beef noodle soup.

This is not optional. The broth is clear and beefy and quietly spiced, the noodles come long and bouncy with a chew you cannot fake with a machine, and it all sits under thin slices of tender beef, a scatter of scallion, and a spoonful of chili oil that turns the whole surface red. You can ask for the noodles thin or wide, and I go wide, always, because the wide ones hold the broth best. A bowl runs you somewhere around twelve, thirteen dollars and it is one of the great cheap meals in this city.

If you’re with someone, add an order of the beef-and-scallion pancake to share.

It comes out crisp and flaky and rolled tight with green onion, cut into wedges, and it is the perfect thing to tear at between spoonfuls of soup. Between the noodles and the pancake you’ve spent maybe twenty-five dollars for two people and you have not even left the first stop.

Stop Two. White Bear, and the twelve wontons I think about constantly

White Bear is barely a restaurant. It’s a little storefront at 135-02 Roosevelt Avenue with a sliding plexiglass window, a couple of stools, and a menu you could photograph in one shot. You order the number 6. Everyone orders the number 6.

The number 6 is twelve pork and vegetable wontons

in a foam container, drowned in chili oil, dried shrimp, pickled mustard greens, and scallion. That’s the entire dish and it’s close to perfect. The wontons themselves are almost delicate, these loose little parcels of pork, and the topping does the heavy lifting. It is savory and spicy and funky all at once. A dozen of these costs about ten dollars, which for what it delivers should honestly be illegal.

Here’s my one honest warning. There’s basically nowhere to sit and the window can have a line, especially on a weekend afternoon in tennis season. Get them to go, walk half a block, and eat them standing up like the rest of us. I have eaten White Bear wontons leaning against a parked car in February and I regret nothing.

Stop Three. Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, because you came for soup dumplings

You cannot do a Flushing crawl without soup dumplings, and Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao at 39-16 Prince Street is the name everyone lands on for a reason. It’s been in the Michelin Guide for years running, the dining room is actually nice, and it’s the one sit-down stop on this list where you get to put your bags down and breathe for a minute. It opens early too, from eight in the morning, which I love.

Order the classic pork xiao long bao

and, if you’re feeling it, the pork-and-crab. The skins are thin, the broth inside is genuinely hot, and the ritual is the ritual. Bite a little hole, sip the soup first, then eat the whole thing. Skip the multicolored dumplings they got Instagram-famous for. They’re pretty and they photograph like a jewelry ad, but the plain pork ones taste better, and I would rather eat the better one. That’s the whole philosophy of this crawl, really.

A steamer runs you well under twenty dollars and it’s the moment in the day where I stop inhaling food and slow down. You’ve earned it. You’re three stops in. This is also the place I’d send you if you only had time for one stop and wanted a chair and a table, no plexiglass windows or foam plates involved. It’s the crawl’s one true sit-down meal, and if you’re doing this with someone who’s nervous about the whole eat-standing-on-Roosevelt-Avenue thing, start them here. The room does a lot of the reassuring for you.

Stop Four. The New World Mall food court, the loudest room in Queens

Down a set of stairs at 136-20 Roosevelt Avenue is the New World Mall food court, and walking in for the first time is genuinely overwhelming in the best way. It’s a giant, low-ceilinged, gloriously loud basement packed with stalls doing regional Chinese food from all over the map. Sichuan, Uyghur, Chongqing hotpot, hand-pulled everything. You could eat here for a week and not repeat yourself.

I make a beeline for the Uyghur lamb.

Find the stall doing cumin lamb skewers on those big sword-length metal skewers and get a couple, and if you have any room left, the laghman, which is a stir-fried hand-pulled noodle dish with peppers and lamb that eats like a warm hug. The skewers are a few dollars each. A plate of noodles is maybe ten. You point, you pay, you find a table in the chaos.

Honest note here. It’s a food court, so it looks like a food court. Nobody’s coming for the ambiance and the tables can be a scramble at peak hours. Come for the food and the sheer variety, not the vibe, and you’ll walk out grinning.

Stop Five. Joe’s Steam Rice Roll, the soft landing

By now you’re full, a little sweaty, questioning your choices, and this is exactly when Joe’s Steam Rice Roll at 136-21 Roosevelt Avenue saves the day. Cheung fun, the steamed rice noodle rolls you get at dim sum, made to order, fresh off the stone-ground batter. They’re soft and silky and they slide down easy even when you swore you couldn’t eat another bite.

Get Joe’s Signature, which loads the roll up

with shrimp, beef, and egg, or keep it simple with a plain shrimp roll. They come cut into pieces, glossed with sweet soy and a little chili oil, and the texture is the whole point. Almost custardy. It’s around ten dollars, they’ll add curry fish balls for a buck if you want, and cash gets you a small discount. It is the gentlest possible way to end a day of eating and I mean that as the highest compliment.

How to actually run the crawl

A few things I’ve picked up over many rounds of this. Bring cash. A lot of these spots are cash-first or cash-only or cash-cheaper, and you do not want to be the person holding up the White Bear window fumbling for a card. Go with at least one other person so you can split and taste more. I once tried to do this crawl solo, and it’s just sadder and you eat less.

Weekday lunch is calmer than weekend afternoon if you can swing it. And if you’re doing this during the US Open, do the tennis first and the food after, because you will not want to sit in a stadium seat after a steamer of soup dumplings and a plate of cumin lamb. Trust me on that one.

The whole crawl, all five stops, runs you well under fifty dollars a person if you share, and closer to twenty-five if you’re restrained, which I never am. Compare that to one lobster BLT in a plastic clamshell at the National Tennis Center. I rest my case.

If Flushing gives you the bug for eating your way across the city on the cheap, I’ve got a whole running list of the best cheap eats in New York City under fifteen dollars, and Flushing earns more than a few spots on it. For the grab-and-go crowd, my guide to the best food carts and street food in NYC covers the stuff you eat standing up, which is half of what we did today. If you want the big picture, these dishes fit right into the iconic foods New York City is known for. Wash any of it down with one of the city’s best bubble teas, which Flushing does as well as anywhere, and if you want to see how the old guard stacks up, my list of the oldest restaurants in New York City is a fun contrast to all this fast, cheap, brilliant food.

So that’s my crawl. Five stops, one train, a stupid amount of great food for the price of a stadium sandwich. But I know you’ve got opinions, Flushing people always do. Which stall did I skip that you’d fight me over? Tell me where you’d send a first-timer, because I will take any excuse to ride the 7 to the end of the line.

See you on the train.

Antonina