I bugged my friend Hyg to come with me and watch this year’s Lunar New Year parade in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and here’s how it went. I stood in the dirty, slushie snow for hours, and saw the following:
After standing around in the cold for hours, Hyg and I were ready to go get shu mai and baked pork buns at Mei Li Wah, which was half a block from the main parade route. We tossed some hot tea and wonton soup in there as well for good measure. Our waitress gave us a completely judgemental look for not ordering noodles with our soups (guess we won’t be living long lives, and also, there was a lot of judgement on this day).
Err, I was so hungry that I’d almost finished the pork bun before remembering to take photos.
We decided to be two little piggies and have some dessert after. Some of the roads were still blocked so we went and tried Beautiful Memory Desserts, just across the street. They had really strange/interesting sounding desserts like “mango thai black glutinous rice in vanilla sauce”, “durian pancakes”, and almond and sesame soups. Hyg and I went with the Combo #3 consisting of “grass jelly with green tea & vanilla ice cream, mango pancakes, and snow white”.
The “snow white” and grass jelly and ice cream desserts both had a base of shaved ice and vanilla sauce. The “snow white” had bananas, lychee, mangoes, toddy palm seeds (which I think are what we call “kaong” in Filipino), and some seeds from what I think is dragon fruit. The grass jelly and ice cream dessert also had some frozen balled watermelon on it, and I think that was probably my favorite of the three.
The mango “pancake” consisted of mango and stabilized whipped cream (almost marshmallowy in texture) wrapped in crepes. This was also excellent, but was sadly overshadowed by the other two desserts. If you’re into desserts that are fruity and not extremely sweet, I would recommend this place, despite the mediocre Yelp ratings.
And then the afternoon ended, but not without a reminder of how much confetti had fallen over us. I brought some with me to the office (carried around in the hood of my coat) the next day.