Lake Pavilion in Flushing
“Uh oh,” I said under my breath. “Is there canada goose coats on sale a wedding here tonight?” canada goose I tried not to sound nervous. I’d talked seven people from three boroughs into traveling to this Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, Queens, about a mile south of the Flushing stops on the 7 train and the Long Island Rail Road. But I hadn’t made a reservation.
The dining room seats slightly canada goose uk outlet fewer people than Citi Field. The only way we might have trouble getting a table would be if the entire place had been rented out by a couple about to walk hand in hand into marital bliss. And that’s exactly how it looked.
A classical white arbor stood at the entrance, threaded with silk rosebuds. Lavender swags had been draped from the rafters, and lavender napkins were propped up in the water goblets. Shiny cheap Canada Goose gold curtains hung in the windows, and enormous bows in pink or burgundy flopped from the back of every chair. Servers were buzzing around, immaculately dressed in black suits with red bow ties or striped neckties.
But no, there was no uk canada goose outlet wedding. Lake Pavilion looks like that every night. It is almost certainly New York’s snazziest banquet Canada Goose Parka style Cantonese restaurant located in a former diner. Since its opening last year, canada goose coats it has shimmered above the Main Street exit on the Long Island Expressway in a squiggle of canada goose factory sale blue neon. Off the main dining room, in a string of private rooms marked by varieties of tea spelled out in red LEDs, Chinese families salute birthdays and other milestones with lobsters the size of single Canada Goose Jackets engine planes.
For the rest of us, finding a Cantonese seafood restaurant as good as canadian goose jacket Lake Pavilion is a reason Canada Goose Outlet to get a group together. By day, canada goose uk shop dim sum trolleys cruise the dining room like a fleet of dumpling laden Zambonis. The real interest, though, is in the menu, which goes on for about a dozen pages and does not waste any of them on Chinese American silliness. This kitchen is as serious as any in the city about Cantonese classics, along with a few more recent notions from Hong Kong.
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If Dungeness buy canada goose jacket crabs are in season and you do not have a life threatening allergy, please order them. Get them stir Canada Goose Coats On Sale fried with ginger and scallions, their cracked legs and deep dish bodies sticky with a sauce that will end up everywhere while you pull the meat from the shells: on your lips and nose and thumbs and probably your earlobes.
At least as delicious and certainly less gooey is the house special, a casserole of Dungeness crab stacked up on sticky rice that’s been lightly browned while being turned and canada goose uk black friday tossed with roasted peanuts, garlic chives, ham, onion and liberal strafings of fried garlic.
When the crabs scuttle offstage between seasons, you could bide your time with clams in “hot spicy XO sauce.” It looks like soup, the clams submerged in sauce that is not just hot and spicy but also sour, salty and really deeply funky. The sauce gets aromatic depth from onions and bell peppers and a lovely lift from lemon peel, and it’s so intense that the clams taste as if they’ve been stewing in it for hours, yet they’re barely cooked.
Stringy, yellowing water spinach and “crispy fried canada goose black friday sale More chicken” with garlic, which was neither crisp nor garlicky, were the only cases in which I wasn’t rewarded for testing my luck with the menu.
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Sometimes I pointed at a photo of something I wouldn’t have ordered otherwise. This is how I came to try the bizarrely compelling sea scallops in a black pepper sauce that seemed to belong on a TV dinner steak. When nobody was looking, I kept stealing another scallop from inside the circular green hedge of broccoli, convinced that what I was doing was somehow wrong, and not caring.
Menu pictures also helped me give mayonnaise prawns another chance. In other restaurants I’d been left cold, not to uk canada goose mention bewildered, by the combination of fried shrimp, candied walnuts Canada Goose online and lemony, MSG laced mayonnaise. Lake cheap canada goose uk Pavilion adds deep fried pillows of thickened condensed milk. I am not sure why I loved this particular canada goose clearance version. I’m not even sure why the dish exists, but I am glad it does.
Should you want to drive deeper into unusual terrain, I can recommend the goose webs in a casserole with bok choi and Chinese black mushrooms. The thick, floppy webs, which you suck from the goose’s bony toes, had a fascinatingly earthy flavor that reminded me a little of fresh pork belly.
If that doesn’t fully scratch your itch for adventure, do try the screw clams. Stir fried with snow peas and yellow chives, they look a bit like squid, crunch slightly between your teeth and have a faint, delicate flavor. Screw clams are not clams. They are often called osmanthus mussels, although they are not mussels, either. They’re organs extracted from sea cucumbers, which are not, of course, vegetables.
But there is no shame in having something as simple as the excellent stir fried lamb canada goose store chops, whose only sauce is a little oil deeply flavored with browned garlic and shallots, or something as old school as Peking duck. Lake Pavilion does the dish beautifully, shearing off rectangles of skin with a cleaver and tucking them inside yeasty steamed buns dabbed canada goose clearance sale with a little hoisin. The soft buns make a much https://www.goosesale.ca more Canada Goose sale satisfying foil for the crisp skin than the pancakes you usually see in New York, and by the time the rest of the duck had been carved, our table was still passing around the platter of little sandwiches, going back for just one more.
A group of six or eight is about right for the duck, and for Lake Pavilion. But look out for the gentle upsell. Order one lobster or Dungeness crab, Canada Goose Online and your server buy canada goose jacket cheap may ask if your gang wouldn’t be better off with two. If you want a fish netted in a splash from the tanks by the door, you may at first be shown the species that cost $35 a pound, $75, or more. Ask for cheaper options, like a speckled grouper from Mexico that emerged dense and moist from the steamer, and cost less than $20 a pound.
Your server may not push a $110 bowl of shark fin soup, still legal until next summer, but may suggest an off menu soup served in a hollowed out winter melon for around $50. Politely decline in favor of the more humble winter melon soup that’s on the menu, its homespun chicken broth full of sweet seafood and ginger slivers. A pot that serves the whole table is $12.95.