Sea cucumber in Chinatown New York City



the sidewalk will eat you up!

It's located between Time Square and Ground Zero with the famous Canal Street running through it.  New York's Chinatown is like one giant block party without the booze.  New York's Chinatown is based outside with crisscrossing streets of colorful shops, fresh produce stands and restaurants.  The buildings are all connected and very vibrant in colors, if you look through the alleys you can find laundry hanging out to dry just like in the movies. It was almost as if I crawled down the rat infested manhole and ended up in China.

Chinatown sidewalks are so crowded that it will literally eat you up and spit you into the cab infested streets, it seems like the pigeons get more respect than you do.  You can also easily get lost because of everything looking the same, and I don't mean the Chinese people, it's the shops that sells a lot of similar things.  It's like being in a game where the background repeats itself.  You'll have vendors yelling and annoying you with deals and offers, my advice is just to walk right pass them.          

The good thing about Chinatown is you won't have to venture far for Chinese food, there's one literally at every spitting distance.  The only problem you'll have is which one to choose from.  Me personally I didn't care because I'm sure they are all good.  I chose the one closest to me at that time.

Old Yeah Shanghai Deluxe cafe attracted me because of the traditional window display of lifeless Peking ducks and Suckling pigs dangling on hooks, just waiting to be consume by hungry tourist and New Yorkers.  Shanghai Deluxe is decorated with traditional bright paintings and Chinese writings.  The minute you walk in you can see live sea critters in holding tanks and an array of already cooked seafood being displayed along the windows.  It has an opened kitchen for all to see and smell from the butchering and cooking of Gods creatures.  I wouldn't  recommend this place to PETA at all.  

Once I got situated I eagerly opened up the menu to find the most bizarre dish they had to offer.  For my appetizer, I chose the sepia or also known as cuttlefish which looks exactly like a squid.  I had mine steamed and chopped up in bamboo shoots with various Chinese spices.  The taste and texture is similar to calamari, the bitter bamboo added great contrast with the sweet cuttlefish.    

My entree was something I always wanted to try but was afraid because of how this animal looks like.  It's the most ugly living creature I've ever seen besides Whoopi Goldberg.  The sea cucumber is shaped like a cucumber that lives and feed on the bottom of the ocean, when it's disturbed, it secretes it's own slimy intestines as a defense mechanism against predators.  Luckily for me I'm not a predator but only a hungry tourist that paid someone else to do the dirty work.



sea cucumber

The sea cucumber is stir fried in various Chinese vegetables with a beautiful edible lotus flower as garnish.  It is chopped into tiny spiral pieces that also looks like calamari, but the taste and texture is nothing like that of calamari.  It tasted just like play-dough with not much flavor at all and the texture is almost like gelatin.  If it wasn't for the sauce from the vegetables it would be very bland.  Once you get past the texture the sea cucumber can be tolerable in my opinion.

You can find sea cucumber or cuttlefish at just about any Chinese restaurant in New York City.  The Chinese consider sea cucumber as a delicacy therefor making it pricey depending on the market.  It doesn't hurt to try things just to say you've tried it.  One thing for certain though, Chinatown won't disappoint. I highly recommend taking a little stroll down the urban forbidden city, bare in mind you won't find any zen garden in this concrete jungle.