Against listicles, in defense of eating bad food looking for magic
10 days, 3 Chinatowns, and everything I've learned about how to find good food without relying on critics.
In DC, I pick a hotel in Chinatown with windows that can open on purpose. Because of the smells of the bakeries in the middle of the night, how they waft into the hotel room and you wake up to the smell of yeasted dough.
I woke up at midnight and again at two in the morning and again at five to the sound of motorcycles revving and music blasting from speakers on those bikes that throw sound out into the city and bounce off the buildings. At five in the morning, underneath the rap music coming from a motorcycle, there was the sound of some kind of calming music drifting in from some restaurant prepping something that smelled like burnt sugar. So I went to go see what it was.
The smell from the street was some kind of pastry, with the door wide open and a giant closed sign hanging from the frame, fluttering in the wind, like, we want the fresh air but don’t you dare come in here dear god it’s 5:00 am. I opened up my phone to Google how many stars it had: 3. I didn’t know when it opened. It was unclear both from the internet and the storefront, which had different hours, but I knew that I had to go. I stood in the doorway to soak in the smell just a little bit longer. That’s when a woman came out the back of the shop into the black of the restaurant and said, “If you have cash, come in.”
I did. Always do when I travel. Carry it in my sock along with a switchblade or strapped to my thigh in a holster with bear mace, state laws depending—because traveling solo as a woman and crisscrossing the country requires, still in 2024, some kind of protection.
I ordered pastries from the cases that were only ⅓ full. I’d drop them off at the homes of chef friends throughout the late morning, asking them for one tiny bite. But what I wanted was what I could smell. “Can I have whatever I can smell right now,” I asked. She came out with a brown sugar bun. Still warm. It was beautiful, perfect. I stood in the empty DC street and ate it, plastic bag of pastries in my other hand.
By the time of this writing, the shop has shuttered, replaced by something else.
That’s Chinatown in DC, where most of the hotels are, and where I think everyone should stay anyway. It is where I always stayed in DC when I was younger and here for work, meandering my way through shop after shop looking for good dim sum or ramen with some heat or some kind of fried tofu served alongside slit chiles and sticky sauces after going to a steakhouse (I was vegan) and eating only a really sad salad.
I did this before the rise of Eater, before the domination of “best of” lists, and before I personally was addicted to doom scrolling. I had no internet at my house, no TV, and a phone that didn’t have a lot of data. I found food by walking around. By throwing darts.
The easiest way to find good food consistently that’s a hidden gem is in Chinatowns and Koreatowns and Little Indias/Ukraines/Guyanas all over the country is to throw a dart, but then Google it, and if it scores at 3.5ish, it probably means it’s pretty good and other people threw darts and expected an Americanized version of something to be there that wasn’t on the menu.
When people ask me how I pick restaurants, I don’t tell them best of lists or recommendations. I tell them I either play darts or I scroll down endless lists of restaurants and read the reviews. I do this for all kinds of restaurants, including fancy ones, but I learned that skill from eating on my own before the domination of “best of” lists. Then when those lists became the main way people found restaurants, I realized my favorite spots were not on them. So I tried those lists, thinking maybe there was magic in them.
As I worked through them in multiple cities in 2023, I realized the “best of” lists in Chinatown were mostly Americanized Chinese restaurants (sometimes really good!!), but that there were entire categories of food that was missing and that most lists had a formula: one dumpling spot, one bakery, one soup shop, etc.
Sometimes the best dumplings are at a bakery that also has one single dumpling. Or sometimes the best tofu dish is at a grocery store with a tiny counter. And you won’t learn that from those lists. But you can find them—if you put in the work.
So go to Yelp or Google or whatever. Start with the three star reviews. It’s where I start for most restaurants regardless of cuisine, but especially if I think that the average American diner might be looking for something specific and get upset when they don’t find it. If you find a few reviews that say, “Too spicy,” or they hated that there was no General Tso’s? Go. If the review is three stars because the food was good but service was painfully slow? Go.
If there are five star reviews that say “reminded me of home” alongside two star reviews that say “there is no atmosphere?” Go. The atmosphere is home.
Read to find what people liked–read to find what people say not to order. Look at the photos. If the rice dishes always get five stars and the dumplings get three and you can see they’re under steamed, get the rice. If everyone says you need to get the mooncakes but that the egg tarts are all right, get the mooncakes there and keep searching for the best place for egg tarts.
Reviews are a microcosm of the restaurant experience with outliers and also general consensus–and unlike professional critics, most of the time they’re gonna get the quality of food that you are getting (critics and influencers get better quality food most of the time).
No professional photos, just person after person taking horrible dark photographs of their food and trying to convey something to you. And if a horrible dark photo of the food looks good? Go. Sometimes what reviews convey is spot on and thought out enough that I order what those people got. Sometimes reviews tell you a hidden message they didn’t mean to share, like that you personally want all the heat you can get, so you’re going to the place they thought was too spicy.
Chefs often wish you would not read those reviews, think they are unfair, and some of them are. It’s unfair to give a restaurant one star because someone didn’t offer you a water and then say the food is some of the best you’ve ever had. But then you go in knowing no one is going to offer you a water, so you can bring your own. It’s unfair for someone to say that the baby crying ruined their experience, but then you know you can bring your baby. It’s unfair to people to say that they hate the restaurant because it doesn’t have a particular Americanized set of dishes they like, and that’s when you say to yourself, “Bingo. That’s what I want.”
Chefs and the restaurant industry in general act like Yelp and Google reviews are some kind of pain in the ass, but it’s really a diary of night after night in their restaurant, which includes some assholes and also includes memories you as a chef helped make.
As a person who scours these reviews day in and day out, on the balance, I think they are fair, deeply human, and wildly interesting.
So, that’s what I do in Chinatown–and sometimes across entire cities. I play darts.
I walk in with no idea of where I am headed. I go to the door. I look up the name. I read the three star reviews standing in the window, looking for my secret keywords that tell me this is my spot (too spicy being the main one). In Chinatown, my eyes move rapidly to find dishes I’ve had once in a Chinatown somewhere else and fell in love with–something hyper regional, something rare in America, something that says something about what it means to build a home in diaspora. After years of practice, I know what I’m looking for. Sometimes, I’m wrong. Most of the time, I’m right.
I’m not special or unique in having this skill—you’re just probably out of practice.
I have so many memories in DC’s Chinatown hunting for something I’ve never tasted before, hunting for heat, for dishes that taste to other people like home. I used to walk the streets at lunch time, returning from whatever bougie neighborhood I had wound up in for morning meetings, looking for restaurants with reviews like why is there brain on the menu or ones with Christmas lights strung up in June.
Days passed this way for me in my early and mid twenties, with almost every single restaurant I loved now closed and replaced with a new shiny sign and someone else with a dream.
It’s funny, because people see the food I eat and think I only love fine dining. But often the first place I go when I touch down in any city is Chinatown (K-Town in NYC).
Some of the best restaurants here are missed by critics and by awards and by random patrons alike almost across the board, when they hold some of the best food in any city.
And look, you might complain to me that that is not true. That there are one or two restaurants from Chinatown on your local best of list, but I’m guessing that there’s four or five or six worthy of that list. There are probably four or five or six American fine dining restaurants on your local list, why is this different?
You have to go and figure it out yourself: who did they leave out? In 2024, reliant on Eater and Thrillist or Yelp at 4.5 stars and up, people have lost this skill. We’ve lost it because we’re scared of eating bad food.
I have eaten so many bad dishes from restaurants doomed to close, but that’s part of the joy of it. Part of the joy of finding the best food is eating trash along the way–alone or with friends. And then there is a moment in which you experience the magic of something you’ve never had before done right. You won’t get there if you don’t eat some bad dishes—besides, eating bad dishes (and making bad dishes) teaches you a lot about what you like.
You’re going to eat some bad food along the way if you’re shooting darts looking for magic. I eat bad food all of the time.
That’s the journey we’ve lost with Eater and Thrillist and the New York Time’s best restaurants of X year. We’re picking other people’s favorites and calling them universally beloved–or we’re picking pretty plates or we’re picking most people could go there and call it good or we’re picking I like that chef or we’re picking new and shiny. And chefs? When you ask chefs where to eat, they just pick their buddies. It sends tourists and locals alike into a crap shoot of restaurants that are chosen based on a mix of reasons, but not always based on the best food, and definitely almost always omitting large swaths of the city and suburbs, mostly in diasporic foods. Most of the food on those lists is good enough. But I’ve found some of my favorite restaurants by digging around on my own.
So, I’m sorry, but if you want to find the best food in your city, you have to go out and find it yourself, and you’re going to have meals along the way that you wish you’d never had. But that’s the joy of finding the good shit.
Throw a dart. Roll the dice. Don’t use a list to find out where you go next. Choose a neighborhood or a random mall or a block of fancy pasta spots and then go there and figure it out yourself. And if it’s bad? Laugh about it. Some of my favorite most memorable meals of my life were terrible, horrible, god awful meals I found by poking around. My friend Dan and I shared the worst Indian food of our collective lives in Omaha over a decade ago. We still talk about it. I had the worst pasta of my life in Knoxville and I still tell the story of how I got out of there. I once went into a bakery that was obviously re-sold Dunkin Donuts and I laughed so hard in the car, deeply respecting the hustle.
I have so many moments like this in my life inside and outside of Chinatown, looking for magic, but I’m telling this story to you through Chinatown because I want you to go there.
Because you probably don’t go there enough. And because critics from the Michelin Guide to your local newspaper don’t give Chinese and Chinese-American chefs the credit they deserve for the excellent food they spit out night after night. Neither do American fine dining chefs, who are pulling heavily from Chinese cuisine right now, but you might not know it, because hardly any of them tell you.
That January morning of the brown sugar bun, I found myself rocketing out of DC rapidly towards a city I said I would never step foot in again on my way to my favorite Chinatown in the country: Philadelphia. Where most of the restaurants I loved there have also closed, but Chinese breakfast was waiting for me early on Sunday morning at a restaurant with detailed signs in Chinese and simple signs in English (think: bun, that’s the whole sign, it’s just bun).
When you pass through the gates of Chinatown in Philadelphia in the morning, you are hit with the smell of sugar and fried dough. Throw a dart at any of the bakeries and they’re bound to be good, but I have my favorite.
When I opened the door at Zhong Gang, a man said, “Ah!” He’s a regular, not a staff member, and he was listening to the news out loud on his phone in Chinese. There were two women sitting at the same table they always sat at and they looked at me, too. They were talking quietly, back and forth between Chinese and English. “Hi,” one said to me.
“Hi,” I said to her.
“Did you move,” she asked. I just nodded. It had been seven years.
One of the reasons I hated Philadelphia is I felt like when I went places every single day, no one noticed me. I became regulars at places and I still felt invisible.
Never in my time coming here did either of these people utter one word to me. I could not believe they remembered me. I had experience after experience like this in Philadelphia, walking into bars and someone saying, “Ah!”
It had been seven years since I had been to this bakery. It was the same as it ever was, but I was no longer the woman who used to come there. My hair was different. I was not hungover. I had moved into the mountains, then home. I was in all black sweats instead of business casual. I had tattooed freckles onto my face and more all over my body. And they remembered me.
The woman working the counter did not say, “Hi.” She said, “We’re out of coffee.” My egg tart and butter bun were already on the counter. She poured me Hong Kong tea (my back up order for no coffee) and put the egg tart on top of it. She asked me, “For here or to go,” and the only difference is that you get a napkin, so even if it’s to go, say, “For here.”
But I did, for the first time, take it for there. I sat in Zhong Gang for 30 minutes, fighting the urge to cry. Then it came. I couldn’t help it. I started crying in Chinatown.
I was lonely in Philadelphia, like so, so lonely. And this was not the only experience I had like this. Person after person at counters across Philadelphia said welcome back to me, some of them remembering my name. I learned something about how people in Philadelphia care about you, maybe. They don’t acknowledge you when you are here. They miss you when you are gone. When I used to come here when I lived here, the woman at the counter at Zhong Gang never got my order ready for me before I hit the counter. That time, she did, like I was more precious because I have come back. It was that way across Philadelphia, inside and outside of Chinatown.
I started to count the people coming in and out. 17. Some of them came in and started talking to the woman at the counter before the door had shut behind them. I’d never sat here before. I’d always gotten it to go. And so sitting there, I guess, I don’t know, I missed something about this place by not sitting here. I missed the community who came in.
But look—if you order for here for real? Take your bag off the seat next to you and clear the space across from you, because if all the tables are full, you’re sharing.
Which is how I found myself sitting directly across from a man who has to be like 94 at a four top (buddy, you could have sat diagonal from me). A man came in playing music in Spanish full blast from his phone. He was one table across from me and got four pastries for himself. The social norms of Philadelphia for a moment were broken. Competing sounds of cell phones, sharing tables, the place I always felt the most connected was here—in Chinatown.
I stayed longer than the man with the four pastries. He wolfed them down and on his way out he said to me, “Best breakfast in the city,” acknowledging a fellow traveler who has wound up in a bakery not featured on any best of list honestly and simply because it is in Chinatown and not in Rittenhouse Square. I found it because I went to every bakery in Chinatown looking for the best one. “Hey,” I said to him, because I was curious, “How did you find this bakery?”
He pointed to his uniform. It was construction. “I worked across the street,” he said. And that’s it. That’s often how we find the hidden gems in cities—we find ourselves directly across from them. I tell people to do that all the time. Eat everyfuckingwhere in your neighborhood. Find the places you like. Don’t travel outside your neighborhood until you know it so well, you know what you need to travel to get done right.
You can get the corn or the cream or the scallion roll at Zhong Gang. You can get anything here, really, but I get the egg custard and butter bun and move myself along to other bakeries I haven’t tried yet. And the score on Yelp? Like I say, ballpark 3.5—this is 3.8.
I can give you a map of my heart in Philadelphia. The places I went. The people I met. But I always felt invisible and hollow. I was in Philly running back to those places and most of them, even if I remembered the staff, they didn’t remember me. But here? When I left, the two women talking earlier said, “Come back soon.”
Oh and hey if you’re in Chinatown and you need a Gatorade because you’re super hungover? This is the spot. That’s why I picked it, by the way. Because when I was in Chinatown I was always, always, always hungover.
That morning, I wasn’t hung over, I had a train to catch north into The City and out of this one, looking for my favorite snack, which I have yet to find anywhere else except 122 Meat Market and Deluxe Food Market.
Writer’s Note: I went to go make recommendations to my friend Dan, who is in Philly, and learned Zhong Gang is temporarily closed due to a fire. Chinatown in Philadelphia is cut throat, but I always thought they would last the test of the time–I hope they reopen quickly. And if they do, I hope you go. In the meantime, go to my second favorite bakery (and lots of chefs’ favorite spot), Mayflower. But hey, be like Dan. One way to find good restaurants is to ask your foodie friend where to go.
122 Meat Market and Deluxe Food Market are the same building on different sides, one open railroad apartment style concept that spans the space between streets. You can enter from either side, it doesn’t matter. I found it without the internet, but not based on anything above.
I chose the places I went in Fargo based on lines out the door. Sometimes, I ask 20 locals and pick the restaurant that comes up more than once–this is fun! People love to answer this question. I ask servers or chefs in restaurants that I love, telling them with a laugh, “Just don’t tell me to eat at your buddy’s spot.” If you don’t do this, they will just send you to their buddy’s spot. Sometimes, I ask hotel staff (though the last time I did this I got sent to a sports bar and had the worst soup of my life). If you see a person with a chef’s knife tattoo, ask them, same caveat about not telling you to eat at their buddy’s spot (or their spot).
In Little Italy, I look for a place where I can see the pasta being made. In Little India, I look for pav bhaji even if I don’t want pav bhaji (who am I kidding, I always want pav bhaji). In K-Town, I go on lunch breaks and stand on a corner to follow the flow of traffic. At slice shops, I look for someone standing at the window with a slice that holds up well in their hands. For bagels, I look at the Everything Bagel to see if it’s coated. I like silly coffee drinks, so I look in the window to see if there’s something like an orange blossom latte. For pastry, I look at the color on the lamination in the case and the number of croissant flakes on the floor. For fine dining, I look for a guy sitting in the restaurant in a baseball hat. And in Chinatown, I look for Peking Duck.
I used to say “don’t tell anyone,” when I told people that. But now it doesn’t matter. Before I knew how to pick restaurants to eat at on my own, I chose the places I would go to eat in Chinatown based on the Peking Duck in the window. I was vegan–and I still think this rule applies if you are vegan.
I don’t just mean any Peking Duck. I mean a certain kind of Peking Duck. The kind my ex-boyfriend taught me to look for in Chinatown.
“You’re looking for how crispy it is,” he said. He showed me photo after photo of it, taught me how to tell if the fat was mostly rendered, taught me how to look at the way it hung, the coloring. “Like a gradient on the wings, almost black at the tips,” he said. “Like the top of a creme brûlée, you should think if you hit it with something it would crack. Shiny, glossy, gleaming,” he said.
This works most of the time, but not all of the time. Sometimes, Peking Duck comes from other restaurants or butchers or grocers. Sometimes, the Peking Duck is the only good thing. Sometimes, you go into a place that only has Peking Duck and the rest of the store is literally empty (this has happened to me more than once). But if you don’t want to pull up Yelp or Google, the places with Peking Duck in the window in Chinatown are a good place to start.
I typically go into the first bakery I see, get a pastry (I get a butter bun now but when I was vegan I’d get a red bean bun), and then walk around Chinatown looking for where to eat with greasy fingers. I stop in at places to get candy or tea or whatever, circling and circling. I bring back fortune cookies for my friends–fortunes from places afar–and I’ll stop into a few places, bopping in and out, before I settle on where to eat.
Chinatown in New York is beautiful. Lights and city trees and buildings that feel like homes. In the morning, it’s so quiet, except for the occasional garbage truck or FedEx driver. I chose 122 Meat Market because it had the most crackable looking Peking Duck.
When I walked inside for the first time, the quietness of Chinatown in the morning left with a whoosh. Alive, white hot light, the smells of meat and baked goods hitting you all at once. Wall to wall people.
The first time I walked in, the moment I knew it was a place I would return to again and again, was when I looked at all the bags of pastry and they were steaming. I picked up egg custard tarts and they were still warm in my hands. I touched other pre-wrapped bags of pastries, all warm. I checked for heat lamps. There were none.
Still vegan, having just rescued a bunny from a live kill market (long story, it was a long time ago), I turned around and saw something I have only seen here and never again. It’s called a beef cake and it is neither beef nor cake. It is a fluffy scallion pancake bun that feels like an entire world in your hands. Eight inches across, still hot, definitely full of butter, I ate it while checking out (with cash–always bring cash to Chinatown). I took big bites directly into it, one of those moments chefs write about in their memoirs as being defining moments of what food can do. That happened for me here in the morning, sun streaming through the duck filled windows.
I’ve chased this fluffy scallion pancake everywhere. Popping into bakery after bakery around the country, unable to find it. I’ve heard rumors that one exists in LA–and I’m going to see if it’s true. I have other things I chase like this. Keralan Masala Biscuits, which you can only get in Kerala and at Thattu. Freshly ground matcha. I’m always chasing the high of vegan sushi from the Sushi Momo empire. Hui food. New York bagels in cities that are not New York. Grits and biscuits in the north. And fine dining, those moments where a dish lands in front of you and you gasp at how beautiful it is. Most food is referential. This obviously is. It is referencing a scallion pancake.
But sometimes, some things are done so well or haven’t escaped from their restaurant yet through a viral video so you cannot get them anywhere else. Which, after years of trying to find food without “best of” lists, you’ll wind up with this: searching obsessively for things you found once that you didn’t realize were rare and special until you couldn’t find them anywhere else.
I am sure somewhere else in this country, there is something like this, but I haven’t found it. So my first breakfast in New York, on this trip through three Chinatowns in ten days was this. Standing in front of the window, I texted the man who taught me how to pick a Chinese restaurant at nine in the morning with, “What are you doing?” A group of four chefs lived together in his apartment. He texted back, “Nothing, why?”
“Do you have rice and eggs in your fridge,” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Chili crisp,” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I didn’t need to ask if he had brought his knives home.
I asked for a whole duck, not pieces of it, not carved, confusing the man behind the counter talking to me. “All,” he asked.
“All,” I said. It was nine in the morning.
I picked up egg tarts, butter buns, four giant beef cakes. I showed up at that apartment with a whole ass duck I had stuffed in my backpack, the smell I am sure, leaching out of me on the subway. When I pulled it out of my bag, he let out a laugh that would have woken the dead.
Doors started to open, sleepy chefs emerging from slumber to see their former vegan friend showing up with a whole ass duck.
“I have no idea what to do with this,” I said.
“No shit,” my ex-boyfriend said, walking to his fridge, taking out the rice, taking out the eggs. He tried to cook, but I wouldn’t let him—I was cooking.
Little nests of rice with eggs fried in them with chili oil. Duck. Pastry. A life that I think most people in New York can have but don’t, where you have everything in front of you and sometimes forget it and go to the same place for the 100th time instead of going one neighborhood over, let alone to another borough. A life you could have if you stopped spending time on “best of” and started spending time on the magic of the hunt for what you like.
At ten in the morning, sitting on the couch because these men work in kitchens but don’t have a table, I had Peking Duck for the first time. I had no idea if it was good to them, but it was good to me. “Is it good,” I said.
My ex-boyfriend answered, “I don’t know how you knew how to pick that, but it’s damn good.”
“You don’t remember?” I asked. “You taught me.”