Last weekend my husband took me to Chinatown in New York City to celebrate my Birthday. Chinatown, Manhattan, home to the largest enclave of Chinese people in the Western hemisphere, is located in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, USA, bordering the Lower East Side to its east and Little Italy to its north (from Wikipedia).
It was exciting to visit the largest Chinatown outside of China. There are plenty of cheap shops and hundreds of Chinese eateries for every budget – Mott street has a good selection.There is a tourist office in the area if you need information about what to do and where to go in NYC. We didn’t have any special places to see, so we just walked the Chinatown streets and enjoyed the variety of food.
It felt like we were in another city without actually leaving Manhattan. We could barely see anyone who wasn’t Asian on the most of the streets there.
The special food we tried for the first time was soup dumplings. They differ from the regular dumplings because the broth and meat are both inside the dumpling. We stopped at Shanghai Cafe on Mott Street. It was a nice looking cafe with a huge menu selection, and the soup dumplings was absolutely delicious. You can see steam coming off the dumplings in the picture below.
There are many exotic fruit stands on the streets of Chinatown as well as delicious looking window displays. Mott and Grand Streets are lined with stands selling unusual foodstuffs such as live eels, square watermelons and hairy rambutans, while Canal Street glitters with cheap jewelry and gift shops. Here you’ll find restaurants representing the cuisine of virtually every province of mainland China and Hong Kong, plus Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai and Vietnamese eateries and shops. Hoy Wong Restaurant reminded us our favorite restaurant in Chinatown D.C. – the cook was preparing food behind a window looking out onto the street. Chinatown in D.C. is really small, but has a good food selection.
As Chinatown, New York City’s largest Asian community, continues to grow, it merges with neighboring Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Little Italy is very differ from Chinatown. The streets of Little Italy are packed with cafés and restaurants with tables outside along the side walk, which resembles Europe in the summer. And, of course plenty of the best Italian deserts are offered there.
We had the best cappuccino and assorted mini cannoli at Café Palermo in Little Italy.
There is such a variety of pasta in the window display below.
And Italian selection of cheeses an meats in this window display.
I like these beautiful Little Italy street decorations.
We are next to the Thai Buddha in the our hotel lobby.
It was a rainy weekend in New York, but at least, it wasn’t cold. 🙂
Before we left for home, we stopped at this Vietnamese restaurant for lunch and had some baked goods in one of the numerous Chinese bakeries. I had some interesting soup in this restaurant. When the waiter brought it, the meat in the soup was very thingly sliced and was raw, but it cooked as soon as you stirred it in the broth. I never tried it before. Surprisingly, it was very good. The selection of baked goods at the bakery was amazing. It looked and tasted as good as in expensive French bakeries, but with much more reasonable prices.
Walking in the rain NYC streets.
Near Penn station at our departure point back to D.C.
