THIS FOOD IS TAKING OVER NEW YORK CITY! | Fung Bros

This is crab legs. Oh my gosh, look at this. Oh, yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to a very special episode of Fung Bros Food. Me and David are in the East Village of New York right now. And in case you guys don't know, there has been an explosion of Chinese restaurants over the past year. And as Chinese guys, it is our duty to try as many as we possibly can. And these places are serving a lot of regional Chinese food that people out there are not even familiar with. Well, Andrew, if there are a lot of spots that we haven't tried, then let's get to it. David, our first spot of the day is on First Ave called Just For Fen. Fun. It's a play on words. Let's check it out. Right here, I have the spicy chicken noodle and I have the number one, which is the most popular, the beef rice noodle soup. I got a shout out to Guizhou because Guizhou is a province obviously doesn't get a lot of press. It's like Sichuan food, but more sour. My name is Shirley. I'm the owner and the chef for Just For Fen. I am originally from Guizhou. I just want to bring my hometown food to the New York City. The beef Guizhou Mifen, it kind of reminds me. It's almost like a Chinese pho. It's more sour and light. Look at this broth. It's not it's not red or brown. It's very light colored. I love this dish because it's spicy chicken, but it's not any regular spicy chicken has a very like deep smoky flavor and the oil that they use. It's slick. It gets onto the noodles and it's just easy to eat here. I have this cold mung bean dish. Let's see if this tastes anything like the spicy chicken dish that I just had. This is completely different. Oh, that's spicy. Oh, this is good. That's spicy, though. Let me get that. Oh, you hear that? Got a lot of spots to go, man. You got to calm down. I got to chill. You got to chill. All right, I'm going to chill. They have a Tangyuan here, which is the rice dumpling dessert because it has that fermented rice taste. That's what I mean by it almost feels a little bit like alcohol. All right, let's go to our second spot, Dunhuang. David, we have just got to Dunhuang. The food is on the table. Before we even get into this, we're going to need some help. Yo, no, man. Thanks for having me. You just finished shooting a basketball video. I did, as you can see the bed and I'm ready to hoop up. Have you ever seen any of this food from Lanzhou, China before? Nah, man. I mean, what am I even looking at? So Dunhuang focuses on food from Lanzhou. And Lanzhou, if you guys have eaten Chinese food, it's known for noodles. Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles. That's a famous spot in Chinatown. But this spot is taking it a step further with the cuisine. Here we have lamb shoulder. Do you know what is really interesting about this dish, Andrew? It's called in Chinese, Huang Men Yang Rou. It's one of my favorite dishes from our mom's home province of Shandong. If you guys have ever had this lamb shoulder dish or this da par ji, which is big plate chicken dish, it's actually a chicken and lamb dish first. And the noodles are just there for filler to soak up all the sauce. Flavors look explosive. Yeah, yo, it's all going in a piece of lamb. He's falling off the bone. Yeah, the meat just melts off. Mmm. The lamb is super tender and juicy and melts in your mouth. And then the noodles are kind of the chew that you can get from it. We have the eggplant salad. I think the eggplant salad is great to cool off. It's a great thing to eat with your spicy food. This is one of my favorite dishes in the world. Yeah. Da par ji. Da par ji, David. What does that mean? It means a big plate chicken dish. I love the way that the chicken's chopped up off the bone. Some people, you know, they don't like it because you got to watch out for bones. But for me, it just means it tastes better. And of course, we have to review the Lanzhou la mian because we are at a Lanzhou spot. You know, like you said, it was really the the red chopped peppers. The finely chopped red chili flakes, man. The scientific name is lattice calcarifer. But for the sake of it, we'll call it the Asian sea bass. This is the Asian sea bass, meaty and flavorful. I actually love that chow mein. This is where it came from. Chow mein, fried noodles, oftentimes gets a bad rep for being like a Chinese-American fake Chinese food. It's not fake food. It's just how it was done or what people thought about it. Steamed egg with fermented rice wine with soup. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's crazy. I feel like I'm drinking some alcohol in this. Hey, eight joule rice. This is sticky rice with eight different things in it. You have different types of raisins, nuts. You got red bean. It's really good. You know, this is the one place actually so far on the list that I hadn't been to and I've been blown away by. I thought this place would come with your family tree. Oh, yeah. We got to keep going because our next stop is a really cool spot called Hunan Slurp Shop. David, we are probably at the nicest looking with the best architecture restaurant. Yes, and most visually appealing too. I mean, even the tomatoes are peeled. It's almost like a little like duck egg roll in eggplant. Got a little pepper in there, a little bit of a thousand-year-old egg, eggplant. Yo, that was smooth. Cherry tomatoes marinated in plum sauce. This is like a great summer food. Wow, this is incredible. This is the smoked pork with tofu. So it's like you got kind of like a meat substitute with the real meat next to it. I'm going to try a piece with a little bit of that chili oil. This is a house-made chili oil. It's the smoothness and it's the lack of preservatives. This is the hometown Lu Fun. So this is like got the rice noodles. So that egg off. Oh my gosh, they have crispy pork here. Nice, smooth, subtle taste. All the food at Hunan Slurp Shop is very smooth. My favorite thing here was definitely duck eggs in the eggplant. I got to tell you something about this cherry tomatoes. You know, I'm a big fan of like side dishes and pickled stuff. Tomatoes now is on that list of refreshing side dishes. I think that Hunan Slurp Shop has been of the three places, the most elegant. I agree. And on that note, let's keep it moving. All right, David, we are here at Dan Kitchen. They serve Hunan street food. You have a tofu rice noodle. Now, this is a little bit different than other Mee Shan slash rice noodle dishes we've been having because you have soft tofu in there. Those flavors are kicking. Really? So I got the Dong Chuan rice noodle, a nice light flavor. But like I said, anything with rice noodles kind of gives you that smoothness. These are called hometown street potato. Boiled or steamed potato tossed in hot sauce. So I will say you're definitely saving on some calories here. This spot was cool because the vibe is different than a lot of other spots we went to. It's small, it kind of feels like basement, backyard. We did hear from some Chinese New York foodies that in terms of authentic Hunan Mee Shan, Dian is the best spot. I had to get this Mu Gua Shui, a gelatinous sweet water with some gelatin in it. That's kind of like a dessert soup. Dessert broth of the mouth-watering chicken, the Kou Shui Ji. Kou is mouth, Shui is water, Ji is chicken. You ever think you'd be a Chinese teacher? Wo Shi Ni De Lao Shi. Oh God, this is, eat it. So Dian, it's an expression in Yunnan, kind of like how maybe New Yorkers might say like, this is like the empire state. Dian province. Dian province, man. Shout out to Dian, food was delicious. On to the next. Love meaning happy, Sha meaning shrimp, crawfish, lobster. We had actually eaten here before and we were wondering if it was at all influenced by like the boiling crab, the boil. She said it's not, it's more influenced by the Chinese style because crawfish is very popular in China. Wa Gu. At first you think it's like every other beef skewer, but you start to taste that fat melt down in your mouth. I predict that you're not going to eat as much of this. What is it? Pork kidneys. How did they get the pork kidneys to taste like pork belly? That's interesting. What is the radish here for? Is it for a cleanser palate? This is crab legs. Oh my gosh, look at this. Oh, this is how you crack crabs with your teeth, by the way. Check out this piece of crab I got though, or this is the piece that you're working for right here. I'm going to dip it back into the sauce. Oh, wow. We are moving on to the cold crawfish. David, you have a spicy one. I have the sweet one. Rip the head off and drink it because you're going to taste the wine inside. Like I'm told that has been soaking up all the plum rice wine for 48 hours. That is so sweet. Gotta give the duck head. Look at that meat that's coming off. Really good duck flavor. If you can get through the squeamish part of eating a duck head, this is actually flavor-wise one of my favorite dishes. You don't usually get the you tiao, aka yao tiao, aka Chinese donut in here with the mala dish, but this is used as a carb to kind of soak all the flavor stuff. On to the last spot, Lumos Kitchen. We're here at Lumos Kitchen in the East Village. And Lumos Kitchen is fascinating because it is a mixture between French and Chinese food. First off, we have a variety of XLBs. Eating it real quick. I started Lumos around like 2014. Supposed to be like a new take on Mapo tofu. Chinese bread dough under it is a deep fried bread dough. And then we layer Mapo tofu on top and then we put cheese and king crab on it. I loved finding the crab in there too because it kind of reminds me of crab mac and cheese. So that's one of our signature dish, lobster fried rice. This is like traditional fried rice, but cooked with the French technique. Very buttery. The Hong Shao Rou is so tender. I do think the chef's technique allowed the Hong Shao Rou to feel light. Yo, this is the tuna tartare, wasabi, mango, tuna, seaweed chip. I gotta say that is maybe the, dare I say, most refreshing tuna tartare I've ever had. Oh my God. I wish I could eat more. I could see especially a lot of non-Asian people coming here to like close business deals or like have birthday dinner. I feel like this might be of all the spots we went to. You might see more Caucasian supermodels here. Yo, you guys, thank you so much for joining us on this East Village New Chinese Food Crawl. It was incredible. Just so glad to meet this new generation of Chinese that are doing things differently. But for the longest time, the image of Chinese goods, Chinese food has been low end. A certain amount of Asian Americans and Chinese Americans bought into that image. People from China didn't want to accept it. They say, no, no, this is not the image. And let me show you my image of Chinese. All right, everybody, that wraps up our video. Hopefully you guys saw some new stuff in the comments below. Please let us know what dishes you saw in this video that you would like to try. If there's any other areas or kind of having this Asian cuisine renaissance of any type, we're interested in knowing what's going on in your neighborhood, in your city. All right, everybody, thanks for watching. We're the Fung Bros. And until next time, we out. Peace. The idea behind it, it was like Baijiu, you know. I thought it was one of the most underrated liquor in the whole world. And also part of the reason because I think people have a misunderstanding about Chinese cuisine. So I kind of want people to learn more about it. That's why I started this whole thing. Wow, I like that mission a lot.