Every once in a while I get an craving for greasy Chinese food that's different from what you can find at your everyday takeout stand.

Some of you may remember my Caribbean-Chinese party from two years ago. The theme had been inspired by the wee bit of my childhood that was spent in Puerto Rico and the hybrid dishes I remember eating at Chinese restaurants there, like chicharrones de pollo and pineapple shrimp. I had also added some Jamaican influences as well, including jerk chicken wings and a cocktail made with hibiscus tea. It was a fun event, but needless to say, Caribbean-Chinese food never became a steady part of my diet.

Flash forward to 2010. Today I found myself in Crown Heights at De Bamboo Express, one of the two or three Jamaican-Chinese restaurants I know of in the city. Objective: a cheap but filling lunch.

The place is pretty spartan, with a couple of wall-lined counters, a few tables, and enormous menus highlighting their $5 lunch specials. (The one cook in the kitchen appeared to be fully Chinese, not happa. You have to wonder whether he grew up cooking Chinese-Jamaican dishes, or switched over from more straightforward Chinese food.) I picked up a jerk chicken lo mein to go and a lime rickey soda. 

These days, you can get almost anything off a food truck. Progressive-sounding ice cream, Asian hot dogs, cow feet, you name it.

However, as I've lamented before, what New York really needs is a banh mi truck. Say you are really craving a banh mi, but happen to be lunching outside Chinatown or the East Village. Say you're in, for example, the East 50's. I'm sure many office workers on these Asian-sandwich-deprived blocks would flock to something different from the usual halal vendors (as addictive as white/red sauce is.) Whoever starts driving such a truck would make a killing.

Likewise, someone should also start a pork belly sandwich truck. Gua bao (刮包) is a Taiwanese "burger" that consists of a slab of pork belly in a mantou, or steamed Chinese bun. In Taiwan, at least, the toppings usually include caramelized onions, cilantro, and crushed peauts.

In New York outside of Chinatown and Flushing, variations have sprung up at places like Momofuku and Baohaus. But again, they are nowhere in Manhattan north of 14th, at least for take-out.

I don't really know why I don't go to Koreatown more often, other than the fact that many of the restaurants there can get pretty pricey. But for months I had been craving bibimbap, which has been an obsession since my trip to Korea two years ago. I especially love the crackling sound of the rice when the bowl arrives at your table and you quickly mix the raw egg on top with all the meat and vegetables in the burning hot stone bowl. And the six or eight side dishes that come with every entree. 

Last week I met up with Kian from Red Cook at Kunjip on 32nd St. I'm not sure if it has the best bibimbap in Ktown, but certainly one of the most affordable. We spent under $30 including tip for lunch for two people, for a smorgasbord of food. Other than the above bibimbap with ground beef and vegetables, here are a few more reasons to go. 

The spicy tofu and vegetable soup. Unlike with most bright red Korean foods, this isn't going to burn your throat. It comes with the bibimbap and a few other lunch specials.

Maybe this post should be subtitled "How I feel about Grand Sichuan after living in China and teaching Sichuan cooking for a living."

While I had never in love with the Grand Sichuan chainlet around New York, it had always been a dependable source of cheap, tasty, and spicy food. It was also a source of fond memories. A year after college, having finally escaped the suburbs of Boston, my earlytwentysomething self had spent the first summer in the city exploring every single recommendation from a battered copy of Time Out's Cheap Eats issue. At the time, it was my bible. Grand Sichuan seemed to be the go-to Chinese restaurant outside Chinatown, so I dutifully tried all the locations, from St. Marks to Hells Kitchen to Murray Hill. That summer, like all others in New York, was unbearable. Eating sweat-inducing dishes like Chongqing chicken and mapo tofu in an air-conditioned environment was, really, the only way to eat spicy dishes in 95-degree humidity. 

Yet, as somewhat of a stickler for authenticity, I was always irked by Grand Sichuan's highlighting Shanghainese xiao long bao on the menus. The long list of Cantonese dishes, "Diet" dishes, and Americanized stuff like Orange Flavored Chicken didn't help, either. While each trip ended with me and my companion(s) stuffing our faces and delightfully bringing home leftovers, something still felt amiss.

Getting my friends to come on food adventures in Flushing is like pulling teeth. Most of them live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, and are very proud of the fact.

"I don't do outer boroughs," says one.

"I don't leave the Upper West Side," says another.

"Why take the train for Chinese food when you can just get it delivered?" asks a third.

Since my life revolves around food, I probably have a distorted view of how far the average person should go for an ideal bowl of noodles or enlightening dim sum. (Queens residents, you're lucky.) Most of my trips on the 7 train are spent all by my lonesome, catching up on the New Yorker or, in the absence of reading material, fastidiously checking email on my phone. So I was pretty excited when Kian of Red Cook suggested we head out to Flushing in search of some restaurant a Taiwanese friend recommended that may or may not have an English name. Sold!

This $4 plate of liang pi noodles ("cold skin noodles") single-handedly made up for all the bad Chinese food I have eaten in the past eight months.

First, a tangent. I spent eight months living and working in San Francisco. Apologies in advance to those in the Bay Area, but really, it seemed impossible to find great Chinese food there. Decent? Yes. Good? Occasionally. Downright atrocious? Far too common. 

With such a big Chinese population, San Francisco should theoretically have Chinese food to rival  Vancouver and New York. But what I found was mostly watered-down cooking, and too many restaurants advertising themselves as Chinese-Thai-Vietnamese-Sushi (what's up with that?) And yes, I also visited the purely Chinese restaurants, and quite popular ones at that.

A trusted friend who was a native San Franciscan brought me to his favorite dim sum spot in Chinatown which supposedly had the best har gow in the city; everything was overly greasy, including the signature dish. Over Chinese New Year, I went with relatives (who are originally from Hong Kong) to a popular dim sum spot on Geary Boulevard in the Outer Richmond; it was the best in the area, but still left us all craving food that is less heavy-handed. I also tried a few other spots in the Richmond and Inner Sunset, but soon gave up and retreated to the trusted cocoon of Mexican restaurants for casual meals. 

Why is Chinese food in San Francisco so disappointing? I posed this question to too many people in the past few months. I expected to called insane for refuting this popular idea that SF is a haven for all foods Asian, an idea that has been pounded into us by magazine article after magazine article. Surprisingly, and fortunately, most had similar thoughts.

Hankering for a sandwich while in the East Village last week, I stopped at Marco Polo Café out of sheer curiosity. The tiny shop on St. Mark's bills itself as "Asian-Italian New Cuisine." The menu, on the other hand, reveals its Asian influence to be entirely Chinese. So, in the spirit of this blog, what the heck.

The restaurant is the product of a Sicilian-American and mainland Chinese husband-and-wife team. So, naturally, you can order dumplings and buns, or pasta, like bison meatballs over penne. (Unlike another Italian-Chinese partnership I wrote about last year, whose menu was completely Western.) But...what's so interesting about a seemingly schizophrenic food selection?

Well, the restaurant does try to fuse flavors on a few of the items. I decided to forgo the Dumplavoli, which, while having a catchy name, is merely a plate of five raviolis and six dumplings.

On the other hand, the Moo Goo Gai Panini seemed interesting. Anyone who grew up with a ton of take-out should be familiar with moo goo gai pan, the Chinese-American stir-fry of cubed chicken, button mushrooms, maybe a few other vegetables, and generous last-minute phlumph of cornstarch.

The last time I ate Yunnan food was over two years ago, back in Beijing. It is not for lack of trying.

In the US, Cantonese, Sichuan, and Hunan food are ubiquitous. Northern Chinese, Shanghainese Xinjiang, and Fujianese are making headways into cities. But as far as Yunnan restaurants are concerned, the LA area can claim four. In all of New York's five boroughs, there is just one.

For anyone new to Yunnan cuisine, the southwestern Chinese province is most well-known for their Cross-the-Bridge noodles. It consists of bowl of boiling broth that arrives at your table with about seven or eight raw ingredients (including eggs, chicken, fish skin, sprouts, etc), which the waiters will then theatrically dump into your broth as quickly as possible so everything cooks table-side. The round rice noodles themselves also cook with the other raw ingredients, and the flavors come together brilliantly if the broth is hot enough. (If the broth is merely lukewarm, that is another, more unpleasant, story.)

Yun Nan Flavour Snack out in Sunset Park does not serve Cross-the-Bridge noodles. Rather, it serves very basic but comforting bowls of beef tripe, ground pork, and fried pork noodles, using the same silky rice noodles that are a tad more plump than spaghetti. Everything is cooked to order.

Now, America isn't the only country that adores fried Chinese food. In Japan, diners go wild for karaage, Chinese-style fried chicken. According to Maki from Just Hungry, "the word kara refers to China, meaning that this method of preparing chicken originated in Chinese cooking (age means deep-fried)". Like the Chinese, the Japanese also marinate their chicken with ginger "to get rid of any gaminess". (Check out Maki's recipe.)

If biting into the crispy shell of General Tso's chicken releases pent-up sugar, biting into karaage will unleash a dark and brooding mix of soy sauce and sake. Dark meat, skin on, is best. And this is a dish that begs to be washed down with cold sake or beer.