How now shui jian bao?

I’ve been eating at Flushing’s Nutritious Lamb Noodle Soup (a/k/a Su Xiang Yuan) for at least a decade and almost always get the namesake dish. The Henanese delicacy is a bowl of milky white broth teeming with tender bits of lamb and chewy hand-pulled wheat noodles. Lately I’ve been branching out and trying other things, most recently something that goes by the English name lightly fried Chinese bread ($5).

“They look kind of like zeppole,” my dining companion said. I wasn’t so sure of that, but was pretty sure they’d be a great accompaniment to a bowl of soup. Much to our mutual delight we found out we’d ordered not fried bread, but shui jian bao, or pan fried buns.

So much more than “pan fried bread!”

While they did have a bready aroma there was no mistaking what these were, pan fried dumplings. And not just any pan fried dumplings either, but pan fried dumplings conjoined by a web of lacy crunchy dough. It brought to mind a now closed Henanese stand that made a similar dish years ago. Inside each bao was a savory mixture of ground beef and glass noodles scented with five spice.

A lot of people ask why I continue to write about Chinese food in Flushing. The answer is simple, amid the seemingly low hanging fruit there’s always something new to discover.

Nutritious Lamb Noodle Soup, No. 28, New World Mall Food Court, Flushing