For some, a visit to Lhasa Fast Food has emerged as a form of pilgrimage. One forestalls on a path of culinary discovery blazed by using the past du toe to Anthony Bourdain and hidden in undeniable sight, inside a mini shopping enclave in Jackson Heights, Queens, Lhasa Fast Food, the Tibetan marvel at the top of a corridor of mobile telephone stores, a tailoring enterprise, and jewelry stores.
Lhasa has been an open secret for fanatics of momos, Tibetan dumplings filled with pork or red meat, and thousands of chives or cilantro. Its walls, the colouratioa n of a creamsicle, are embellished with the American flag and a framed photo of Bourdain with the eating place’s proprietor and chef, Sang-Jin Ben. The laminated menus are frayed, and the day-by-day specials are stuck to the wall, scribbled on green printer paper. The open kitchen is a fog of boiling stew pots, steam baskets, and the regular graceful thwack of freshly rolled dough for dumplings and noodles. The Dalai Lama gazes beatifically over the proceedings from any other framed portrait on a perch above the kitchen. The decor is sparse, and the tableware is disposable.
However, the food is a warm invitation to the Tibetan food lifestyle. Steaming bowls of thenthuk, hand-pulled nubs of noodles swimming in a tomato-chili broth replete with greens and pork, are famous, as is shapta, hot strips of pork fried with mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns. Bamboo steamers, complete with momos, occupy every table, served with a warm sauce that appears like a call to hands. The Tibetan populace within the United States is small, envisioned at around 9,000 in 2008. In Jackson Heights, the Tibetan community has been developing progressively because of the early 2000s, rubbing shoulders with Nepalis, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Peruvians that populate one of the most various neighborhoods inside the United States. Lhasa Fast Food opens a small doorway into the foodways of this underrepresented network.
