Chinatowns: NYC and Boston

Hi, I am back!  I have been doing all sorts of things.  And I will tell you all about it.  But first, I am going to take a few more posts to tell you about the last few places that we loved in NYC and Boston.  And the theme is Chinatown.  Above is the entrance to Boston's Chinatown.  It is much smaller than NYC's, but both were great.  

Here is the Nice/New Green Bo restaurant in NYC's Chinatown.  I showed you the soup dumplings we had.  They are dumplings filled with soup.  Although, they aren't called soup dumplings on the menu.  I can't remember what the English part of the menu said, but I had to ask what dumpling was the soup dumpling.  They are Xiaolongbao in Chinese.  And I think the menu might have said something about pork and buns.  Not sure though.  

They really were delicious.  We also enjoyed the regular pork dumplings.  But filling dumplings with soup is just too good to be true.  I guess they make them by putting frozen cubes of broth in the dough (according to Wikipedia).

The restaurant is not fancy.  Semi-dirty.  They are too busy making amazing soup dumplings to clean, I think.  But I am not complaining because we arrived really late and they kindly served us (we were the only ones in the restaurant).  Although, there was no closing time on the door.

And, you know how at Chinese restaurants, they always serve you tea?  And how most of the time it tastes kind of like water with a little bit of flavor...but it is hard to put your finger on what the flavor actually is?  Maybe it is dust?  Maybe it is a little burnt something or other?  Well, this tea was awesome. No idea what they did.

You can see them cleaning up behind me.

We also checked out Boston's Chinatown.  We went to the New Golden Gate restaurant in Boston.  Like many Chinese restaurants, this one was designed for large families.  They had only a few tables for two people and only a few tables for four people.  The majority of the tables were for 8-10 people.  Secretly wished I was eating with some of those families.  They had so much food and so many different dishes at their tables.  Some of my coworkers, a while back, treated us to a family style Chinese dinner and it was like the best moment of my life.  Gnawing on shell fish shells.  It is what I was born to do.

The two of us shared a shrimp and lobster sauce (below) with white rice and each tried a soup.  I got hot and sour soup (above).  It was amazing.  Scot got a dumpling soup (two up).  It was also delicious.

We had to wait probably half an hour to get a table.  This was on a weeknight.  And it was totally worth it.  They have a lot of seafood and lobster specials, which is what I was tempted to try.  But, I wanted to try soup and knew I couldn't eat a ton.  It was super cheap.  Something like $14 for two soups and the shared meal.

And lastly, we had an avocado smoothie at one of the little Boba tea cafes in Boston's Chinatown.  Scot and I love Boba tea.  My favorite is some sort of a Chai tea.  But, we had to try the avocado smoothie since we love putting avocados in our fruit smoothies.  It was awesome.  Not super sweet actually.  Will definitely try to recreate these at home!

I really loved our time in both of the Chinatowns.  We didn't even have time to try all the things we wanted to try.  Next time!