Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

A couple of weeks ago, Alex and I had the unique pleasure of celebrating the merging of Chinese and Jewish cultures (sort of like looking into a mirror haha) at the Museum at Eldridge Street in Lower East Side/Chinatown.  The Egg Rolls & Egg Creams street festival was really cute and I got to see a little slice of New York City history that normally would be a well-kept secret. The Museum at Eldridge Street is a beautifully restored synagogue.  The street fair was laid out in the street outside the temple, with booths for face-painting, yarmulke-painting, paper-fan-making, and most importantly, egg-roll-and-egg-cream-eating.  I learned the important craft of making an egg cream today (not as professionally as if I had, say, a soda fountain): chocolate syrup (U-Bets), milk, seltzer, and stir! The inside of the museum is gorgeous.  It's pretty small, being a building in the cramped LES, but the space is illuminated by beautiful stained glass that, to ...

There's a scant list of Chinese words that non-Chinese people sometimes learn, usually having to do with food.  The average American knows "lo mein," "bok choy," and even "cha siew bao," but I think another one that's making its way out of anonymity is "xiao long bao." Xiao long bao are Shanghainese soup dumplings.  It's pretty much what you would imagine when you hear "soup dumpling": there's a meaty filling and a soupy broth inside a dumpling wrapper.  My cousin says that Joe's Shanghai has some of the best in the city, so he treated us to some xiao long bao there. Joe's Shanghai is a small restaurant on Pell Street in Chinatown that is infamous for long waits and famous for its xiao long bao.  I kid you not, we waited for an hour and a half on the narrow sidewalk for a table.  It was worth it, though.  When you first step inside the restaurant, your nose is filled with this almost-offensive sour...