NYC Food Truck Lunch: Sesame Chicken and Dumplings From Chopstix
Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.
After recently heading downtown and finding a new food truck, Red Olive, we went to the Financial District again and found a mini Asian street food market on Hanover Square. In a one-block stretch just west of Water St, there were food carts with Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese cuisines. Across Water St., on Old Slip, were at least another half dozen food trucks and carts of various ethnicities. You gotta love New York City!
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With such an abundance of Asian street carts, we plan on going back to Hanover Square soon, but for our first trip there in several years, we chose Chopstix, the Chinese vendor. We looked over the menu and chose an appetizer of dumplings for $3 and sesame chicken for $8.
Service was fairly quick, and we started off with the dumplings. The order included six lightly--fried dumplings and a soy sauce-based dipping sauce. The dumplings were filled with peas, corn and ground chicken. Normally, we're not big fans of ground chicken, but these dumplings were quite tasty. Having peas and corn in the dumplings besides ground meat helped diversify the taste, and the dipping sauce was the proverbial icing on the cake. We definitely recommend the dumplings at Chopstix.
Moving on to the sesame chicken, there was plenty of breaded, deep-fried chicken. The sauce is important in sesame chicken, and here it was medium-thick and somewhat sweet, but not cloyingly so. As expected, sesame seeds were sprinkled on the dish, and there were a few pieces of broccoli mixed in, too.
The white rice underneath the chicken and sauce was fine. It provided a good base for the meal, which is all that you need in a Chinese street food lunch.
By the end of lunch, there was plenty of food. We didn't really need the dumplings to be full until dinner, but it's nearly impossible for us to pass up dumplings!
Chopstix doesn't seem to have a social media presence, but you can find them weekdays for lunch on the south side of Hanover Square, just west of Water St. Based on our experience, you should get a solid Chinese lunch for a reasonable price at Chopstix.
