Flushing, Queens —

The next time you take in a Mets game, you may want to show up a few hours early and explore the surrounding neighborhood. Flushing Meadows is home to the U.S. Open and the sculptural ghosts of the 1964 Worlds Fair. On the weekends especially, the park is a buzz of activity. While in most city parks this time of year baseball is the game of choice, here the spirit seems more international with a couple of dozen soccer games in full swing.

Just across the Van Wyck Expressway in Flushing proper, the atmosphere becomes more international yet. This is the largest Chinatown east of California and it is interesting to compare it with its smaller sibling over in Manhattan. Though much larger, the Chinatown in Flushing seems less exotic at first. The sidewalks are wide and less crowded. The archetecture hails from the mid-20th century, not the late-19th. Where’s the chaos? Slowly, it dawns on you. There are NO tourists. Missing also are the hawkers of Rolex, Prada and Louis Vuitton knockoffs. It doesn’t take long before this starts to feel like the real deal.

Here, it’s all about the food. Be sure and stop in at the Hong Kong Market. It is a Wholefoods sized grocery store and a wonderland of exotic ingredients. In produce, there is an entire isle just for different types of choy. Over in seafood, live seabass flop on ice, there is a choice of five different types of live eels and squirming turtles arrive via Korean Air. For those who shun purchasing their dinner living, there are hundreds of different types of tofu products.

Back out on the street, you have to wonder what a dollar will get you. It’s seven Chinese characters long which seems pretty descriptive. It turns out that you will enjoy two skewers of satay style pork and no dipping sauce.

Just about every third establishment here is a restaurant and choosing one is daunting because English is one of the things that is not on the menu. Hence, dim sum seemed like a wise choice because you can just oggle and point. We tried, and I can heartily recommend, the Jade Asian Restaurant. It is an enormous banquet hall and it is noisy! It sort of feels like you are attending an Asian wedding. Great fun. And better yet, it’s a screaming deal. We weren’t starved so we shared six items between the three of us and our bill totalled $11.35. We will be returning for an extended and lengthy lunch!

But now Italy beckons and by this time on Wednesday we’ll be back in Chiavenna and shopping for our dinner in more famiar culinary territory. More on that as it happens.