 It's quality. That is the best fujo fish ball I've ever had. One of the most interesting things about these series, Andrew, what are you actually eating? Sometimes we don't actually know what we're eating. David, I would have not thought that we would have walked into a Fujinese restaurant and ordered the braised frog and been like, whoa, this fire. In this episode, we delve into the province of Fujian. Most Fujinese immigrants in America settled in the northeast, mostly New York City. Fujinese food is defined by the two big cities, Fujo and Shaman. The two cities traditionally speak different dialects, Fujinese and Hokkien. With Fujin's large coastline and mountains, it means you'll see lots of seafood and some mountainous agriculture, like a mixture of mushrooms and even rabbit. We start off on East Broadway in Chinatown, which is known as Little Fujo. Keeps offers clinically proven, research-backed treatments that stop hair loss and promote hair growth. 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Today we're about to jump into some deeper cut dishes because this is one of the most well-known sit-down family restaurants. Art, everybody. We're here at Young Sun. All the food has come out. We got a Fuzhou lunch feast right here. I would say these dishes probably would, David, make for really good, like, regular dinners or really good lunch food. Lichi pork. Lichi roll. Sweet tomato-y. Kind of has a light glaze. I would say this, you could say this is one of the predecessors of Sweet and Sour Pork. All right, David, this next dish we got to try is the Red Braised Rabbit Fun Soup. David, I'm not gonna lie. This soup looks pretty interesting. At first, I thought it was, like, maybe blood, but it's actually just red braised wine soup. I know that rabbit meat, I think, at most restaurants is a little bit weird, but actually some special to European restaurants and even Japanese spots do serve rabbit meat, so it's not the weirdest thing to find. Wine braised rabbit holds out to roll in. I'm not gonna lie. I never thought I would say that phrase on this channel. It's a little bit salty and sour. Not as weird as you think. All right, here we have the mini wontons. Fuzhou-ni style. Guys, it's just a little pinch of meat and a big long cape. Fuzhou-ni's wontons. Previous to this, I had only had the super cheap fast food version. This is my first time having the restaurant-tier version. Wow. All right, so comparing it to the Cantonese wonton, Cantonese wonton soup is gonna have a little bit more of that dried shrimp flavor and a little bit more of that fermented fish sauce in it, while this one actually is more lighter and just straight fish flavor. Andrew, I'm a huge Ba-mian guy. They call it the Paul-mian in Fuzhou-ni's, I believe. Andrew, and you also have some just sweet and sour pork spare ribs. I think this is the number one Fuzhou-ni's dish to start with if you're, like, new to the cuisine. Yo, these are two right here. These are hitting. Wow. I think for sure, you know, the wine braised rabbit, that's gonna be a very polarizing dish. But there's no polarization here, guys. Just how good do you think it is? Good or great. Andrew, I'm looking at the clam, funs, and egg. This dish I've never had before, but it doesn't look too crazy. It looks almost like something you would make at home if you were seaside, beachside. Like we said, Fujian, a lot of coast. All right, I'm gonna be going with this dish right here. It's kind of like rice flakes that are cooked. So it kind of looks like chopped up, Paul-fun, or He-fun. Let's try it. You guys, the best way I can describe this right now is umami. This is like clam chowder without the cream. This is super creamy. I think the eggs add another umami flavor to it. But like you said, very light. You totally could add vinegar to it if you wanted. This food is really like a mixture of some mountainous mushrooms, which are kind of like your wood ear mushrooms, mixed in with also your seafood flavor. So it's very light and herbaceous. All right, you guys, they gave us this New Year's dish, Andrew. This is their version of Ba Bao Fan. Now, every province does it differently. They have their own version here with more peanuts, raisins, and almost, I want to say, some colored coconut on top. This is the Fujianese Ba Bao Fan for Qing Yan. Happy Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year, guys. Savory, lightly sweet, a little oily. Got the little raisin on top. I like it. All right, you guys, we just had a Fujianese feast here at Young Sun. Like I said, this is my first time having some of these dishes at a more elevated restaurant level and outside of a fast food setting. I'm going to go ahead and go with the clam. Funsu is my favorite. That was good. Because this really captured the ocean in the best way possible. And I actually really liked their version of eight treasure rice. It almost made the carb taste like a protein weirdly enough. Also here, these pork ribs with taro. This was a fire dish to be quite frank. Fujianese isn't the most popular style of Chinese food outside of the Fujianese community. But honestly, I think it's a little underrated. After all, it is still considered one of the eight great cuisines of China. See one of my new favorites is Fuzhou balls, aka FJ balls. It refers to the fish ball with marinated pork in the middle. But there's also other kinds of FJ balls that have a chewy potato mochi-like outer with meat inside. And those are really good. Guys, we're here at Xiumei cafe and I'm trying. Yeah, yeah, I butchered that name. But this is not a type of dish that you're going to find a lot at Chinese restaurants. I mean, I definitely see the clear potato starch noodles, but this whole combination of seafood and celery and cabbage. Very rare. It's actually not bad. Broth is really light. Pork flavor, nothing too funky. I would say it almost smells funkier than it tastes. So I want to make a quick distinction that a lot of the food we're eating in this video is from Fuzhou, which is yes, the biggest city in Fujian. But however, one of the other bigger cities that you might have heard of Xiamen is a city that more exported a lot of the culture to Taiwan. So a lot of the Taiwanese food and Xiamen food are going to be similar. However, Fuzhou food is going to be a little bit different. Thus being why you may have not seen dishes like this before, unless you ate at Fuzhou restaurants going up. Here I have one of your classic Fuzhou fish balls. It has fish on the outside, pork on the inside. It's actually not going to lie. Kind of like the fish ball version of a Xiao Long Bao. Guys, Xiumei is actually very high quality. It's very clean back here and the people are very, very nice. I can tell why they let me back there to film because it's quality. That is the best Fuzhou fish ball I've ever had. This is a kind of starch and fried fish stomach soup. Kind of like one of those dishes that you made out of the leftovers from the fish that you had. Fuzhou as a city was not the nicest city for a long time. Obviously it's improving over the past couple decades. But for a while, you know, I mean people are just eating dishes like this out of situation and that's what it is. Pretty fishy. Does kind of give you some of that like kind of sardine feeling. Not a bad soup, but definitely not my favorite. But I do appreciate that. I think it was fried and then thrown in the soup. When eating at a Fujinese restaurant, you know, you got to try the botan man peanut noodles. I saw the tub of peanut butter back there. It looked like more straight peanut butter. So maybe this is a little bit sweeter. It is funny how ubiquitous the sriracha rooster sauce is. This is actually made and started in LA 6-6-6. I thought I'd never say this, but my favorite thing here at Shoemate is the Fujinese fish balls with the meat inside. This was the best one. The meat was fresh. The refresh freshly wrapped. You saw the lady back there doing it. Quality. One of the reasons that a lot of people do not know about Fujinese cuisine is because most of the spots are very sort of like internal for the community, by the community, such as this spot right here. There's no English sign. Okay. This is a duck taro rice noodle soup. Wow. One of the most interesting things about these series, Andrew, what are you actually eating? Sometimes we don't actually know what we're eating. This is the Mishien, you know, the kind of chewy stretchy rice noodles that you see everywhere nowadays. Like we said, guys, the Malaysian bakate is Fujinese in origin. What we're looking at here, Andrew, is a dish that we saw inside of a baozi at Fuzo Wei Zhong Bao. But this is actually a bamboo wine-braised pork dish. This is a common theme amongst Fujinese food, just like celery in the soup. Oh, but I would say, Andrew, specifically of the Fuzo sub-genre. Right. Fuzo food. This is wine-braised bamboo pork. Not super sweet, but a little bit sweet. Honestly, it's an easy to eat dish. No, this was not bad. I am enjoying my meal so far here at Happy Palace. This is huang man yellow braised frog meat. Yeah, man. So I was looking at this dish earlier and I was like, David, there's nothing special about this. What is this yellow braised thing with taro? This is frog meat. I know that frog is totally legal to eat. Plenty of people eat it. French people eat it. French people eat it. All types of people eat it, but it's not a dish that I usually go for. So huang man Tian Ji. Tian Ji. Ribbit. Frog takes the closest to chicken out of anything you've ever had in your life. David, I would have not thought that we would have walked into a Fujinese restaurant and ordered the braised frog and been like, whoo! This is fire. Andrew, we are looking at some Fuzo razor clams. Now, they actually have a ton of really expensive Fujinese seafood dishes. We could not get to all of them. I mean, we're talking about Andrew. They go into the hundreds of dollars, but we wanted to get something absolutely delicious and Fujin is famous for razor clams. Oh, yeah. That's a five out of five. Fuzo Sha Huo Ge. We are in a basement at the East Broadway Mall at Fuzo Wei Dong Bao. Basically, they are famous here for serving the Fuzo Shao Long Bao. This actually reminds me of the Monto style of Shao Long Bao. Let's bite into it. Let's check it out. Oh my goodness. Guys, this meat is like extra, extra soy flavored in terms of the soy sauce, salty vibe. Very, very strong, but very, very good. This is one of the best bouts I've ever had. You guys, it's way better fresh come and get them. It's almost like braised bamboo. They treated it the exact same way as they did the pork. And this is really interesting. I've actually never had this before. This is a Fuzo bamboo cake. This is honestly the first and only bamboo bao I've ever had. I think that, you know, they had what they had around and this is actually pretty good. Here we have an irregular beef ball, but this is something that actually Fujinese also do with fish cake is they just kind of squeeze it in their hands. They don't really try to make it like a spherical shape, try to take your time. They're just trying to give you the food and I totally understand, you know, the shape should not really affect the taste, although it does affect the look. Very peppery beef balls. Those are kind of good. I know they look kind of weird, but they taste very good. Fujin is really known for their dumplings, which is rare because mostly when you think of people who eat a lot of dumplings, you're thinking of like Northern China, Shandong, Dongbei people, Beijing people. I can't say for sure, but I can just say that these remind me a lot more of Gyozas than the Northern dumplings do. Yo, this fried Fujinese dumpling reminds me the most of a Japanese Gyoza out of all the dumplings in China and doesn't make sense that the Japanese got the fried Gyoza from Fuzhou. It actually does. All right you guys, you know that we had to include Chuzhao Fuzhou cuisine as quite possibly Andrew, the most mainstream, multi-racial Fujinese spot. I would say there's even a chance that you're going to see more non-Asians than Asians here. All right, Andrew leading off, I have the yu gu tou tang, which is just a fish bone soup. Here I have the beef tripe rice noodle soup. It has very thin vermicelli, all these different beef tripes here. You can see the stomach, the little tripe, and then the bigger tripe here. It's going on. Andrew, these fish bones, let me tell you this guys, these fish bones have a lot of flavor. For what looks to be a very unappealing dish, the flavor is pretty solid and easy to eat. Of course, you guys, the classic dumplings here at Chuzhao, you see everybody getting them from all creeds and backgrounds. This is pork and chive, and Andrew, you have chicken and mushroom. This chicken and mushroom dumpling is a must get. This is a five out of five. This is my favorite chicken mushroom dumpling in all of Chinatown, and it's super cheap. 10 of them for like four dollars. That's going to be called pork ball soup, which is a large pork kind of Fujinis one ton, less of having the wrapping tail. And then here we have the FJ ball, aka the Fujinis fish ball. Guys, I'm smelling that celery coming from the soup, so that is a trait of Fujinis food. Andrew, if I had to analyze the Fujinis dialect, it kind of reminds me of a mixture of Mandarin Cantonese with a crazy twang on it. No, these are really good. Straight up guys, I can see why Chuzhao is the most popular Fujinis spot in America. These large one tons are really good. I'm going to go ahead and give these a five out of five. Like we said, guys, it's all about the balls. We got small one tons, Andrew, that almost resemble the goldfish, which, you know, we've had at other spots. You can just slip them up. They're very silky here. And this is actually rice wrapped in a rice mochi wrapping. They have other ones that are made out of potato and rice. So let's check this one out. Andrew, these are really good. They actually taste like Tongyuan but with meat in the middle. Wow. This is an underrated dish. I would say you definitely got to try this. It's really soft, chewy, melty, kind of mochi texture on the outside. You know what it is, man? The meat in the middle, Andrew, it kind of has a nice sweet umami flavor that almost reminds me of the filling from Fuzhou Weizhongbao. I think it's really respectable to Fujinis people and all other Chinese people. But honestly, it's got dishes that really hit for everybody. And these are the dishes that we're looking at, guys. I think everybody here, they get the dumplings and the banh mi in. Okay, you have to remember that these are wheat noodles, not necessarily egg noodles. Is there some egg inside? Possibly. But this is mostly wheat. You know, I know that across America, Fujinis people are well known to open up a phase in all different types of food restaurants, not necessarily just Chinese. And usually, you know, not always Fujinis food. But I think Xu Zhao really goes to show you that Fujinis food when it can really appeal to everybody. So while we're in flesh and we stumbled across the only one Zhou restaurant I'd ever seen, it's hard to find this food because one Zhou people are more known for doing good business rather than opening restaurants. One Zhou is actually a city in the southern part of the Zhejiang province, which is four hours away from Fuzhou. Now their food is kind of like if you blended Shanghai Nese food and Fuzhou dishes. So since we stumbled across it, listen, we just had to throw it in the video and just acknowledge it because honestly, a couple of the dishes were really good. Alright you guys, we came all the way to Flushing to Huangjinjiao right now. This is one of the only one Zhou Nese cuisine spots in the entire city. I'm talking about Queens, Manhattan, one Zhou cuisine. Now one Zhou is technically part of Zhejiang province, which would theoretically have put it in our Shanghai Nese video. But due to its location, it sort of splits the difference between Fujian and Zhejiang. So it's sort of a hybrid cuisine. Now if you are not like really in the Chinese world, you probably have never heard of one Zhou people, but they are considered the best businessmen in China. This is a crackling piece of pork belly cut very thinly. I've never actually had anything quite like this before. Maybe something Taiwanese would be similar. I'm not sure. This is the one Zhou Nese chicharron. This is the closest thing to a Chinese chicharron I've ever had. I think on top of noodles, on top of rice, it could go good. This is their Tang Soup Haigou from Wenzhou. You know, cut up a little bit smaller than your typical, you know, vinegar sweet pork ribs. Sweet vinegar. That's the best way to describe it. Very sweet vinegar. Here I have the one Zhou Nese mayoji, which is the sesame oiled chicken. This looks like a roast duck. It's very dark, looks very sweet. Let's test it out, man. Sticky a little bit sweet. Not the barbecue flavor that you would think. I'm starting to get this kind of dark soy sauce slash sesame oil vibe. Really light in flavor. Pretty good, though. Guys, I have the hot food. I'm very excited. We got the one Zhou Nese banmen. We have this one Zhou Nese pickled vegetable chung yaoping pancake. Oh my gosh, that's steaming. That's fresh. And then you have your classic very famous one Zhou Nese hand clamped fish ball soup. This pancake right here looks very, very unique. These two other dishes are going to look like their version of dishes that we've seen before from Fujian. Obviously not saying that only Fujianese people eat that, but that's the reference point. Google one Zhou Nese cuisine. You will see this dish pop up a lot. It's this fish paste that is clamped between the hands. So it's almost in a shape of a noodle, something easier to pick up than a ball. Honestly, for ergonomic reasons, I get it. This dish does not look very good. Kind of ugly, but taste is good. Fish paste is there. Lots of cilantro and a lot of herbal green, you know, scallion flavor in it. Honestly, it's really not a bad dish. I could see somebody eating this for lunch. It's just going to power them through the day. So here's your pickled vegetable pancake has a little bit of meat inside. I kind of like it. You know, there is definitely a slight sourness to these last two dishes, but overall, this is a pretty good eat. It tastes lean, tastes light, great for a snack. Again, great for lunch. All right, you guys, let's take a look at this one Zhou Ba Mian. I see a meat sort of sauce on the top, a lot more vinegar. Obviously, probably coming more from the Zhi Zhang, you know, Jiangsu Shanghai Nese side, one Zhou Ba Mian. Much more vinegar vibe and less peanut vibe. Okay, so one Zhou Nese food between Fujian Nese and Shanghai Nese food, which one do I think it's closer to? It's really, really close. I think that this food visually looks much more like Fujian Nese food, but flavor profile wise using some of the light vinegar flavors and the sweetness, I would say more Zhi Zhang. I think it's so tough to call it. I'm just going to go 5149 Shanghai Nese. It's more similar. All right, you guys, we are here at Super Taste with Chad, the owner of Nori Tai. You are Taiwanese. Yes, I am. And you were saying this Fujian Nese food reminds you a lot of Taiwan. Yeah, especially, you know, this Shao Min food, when I first moved here from LA, they had not so much New York men places. This place was closest to like Taiwanese food that I ever had in New York back then. Yo, Chad, you're going to get the blue robot? No, I had that yesterday. I got the New York men today. Oh, so Taiwanese. Love this. This is the Gua Bao, you know, it's the pork belly bao. It's kind of like the Taiwanese Chinese taco. Eddie Huang made it famous. However, the roots actually come from Quanzhou, which is a city that's right above Shao Min, which obviously does have a lot of influence with Taiwan because it's straight across the water. I expect this to be a little bit sweet and very, very savory. This is a very traditional dish, but at this point, probably more like Westernized people really are drawn to the flavors of this. But honestly, I don't know why more spots don't serve it. I don't think it's a lot of work. I have a special lamb noodle, Fujinese style, but I do want to note because, you know, you wouldn't usually think of Fujian as eating a lot of lamb, but that's because this particular dish is their Fujinese take on a Lan Zou La Mian. Sometimes when Fujinese people cook another province as a food, it may not taste exactly traditional like it's from that province, but it might even be more mainstream in the flavors, meaning that it's kind of toned down. So there's a spot called Spicy Village that is Henan food, but it's owned by Fujinese people. Now, I don't think a lot of New Yorkers would have ever gone to a Henan restaurant or because there's not even that many, but they have the opportunity because Fujinese people are cooking it and maybe the flavors are a little bit toned down, but maybe that's better for, you know, the mass audience. Someone who didn't grow up with a lot of exposure to Fujinese food. It's a cuisine that you really need to dive into to understand. It's more than just sesame noodles and fish balls. Fujinese people also have a huge diaspora for several generations and hundreds of years. They've immigrated to places like Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia, also leaving their mark on the food in those countries too. So you let me know in the comments down below what you think about Fujinese food. Hit that like button and please look out for the next episode.