Best Fuzhou Restaurant: Mystery Meat.

So I am on the subway and pick up a Village Voice.  I am just turning pages and stop at a restaurant review.Enjoy the Fish Stomach at Best Fuzhou Restaurant: A Lower East Side Fujianese also kindly peels your goose feet or the Village Voices older article "Organ Recital" for more info and photos of pig stomach, and click this for more photos.

I read on:"fish stomach" was, anatomically speaking, a flotation bladder—white featherweight masses that bobbed like cotton balls in the limpid broth.... But a plethora of other sea creatures overshadows the simple whole-fish presentations at Best Fuzhou. One example is "clam with fresh garlic" ($12.95)—a warm salad of chopped bivalves mixed with cilantro, green onions, and raw garlic. The quantity is so great that the dish is served in three giant clam shells. We also sucked down an agreeable plate of thin-sliced conch tossed with goose feet—making it easy for us, the flesh had been peeled away from the feet, so the rubbery appendages didn't have to be gnawed..... Amphibians are another Fujianese preoccupation, and the menu at Best Fuzhou is hopping with frogs. Though one is always tempted to proclaim, "It tastes like chicken," frog flesh is really more like fish, and best experienced in "frog wrapped w. leaf," wherein lotus leaves provide a musky flavor to the stringy, pellucid flesh.

With a review like that how can I not ask my cousin David if he wants to meet me there for lunch. We stayed away from the most extreme foods.  Mostly because we did not want to spend $15 on "Frog Wrapped w. Leaf" or $16 on "Goose Intestine w. Tender Leek".  But the mistake we made was both getting the mostly same thing.  David ordered the "Noodle w. Duck & Taro" and I had the "Noodle w. Pig Stomach".  His was better because duck is food. Pig stomach was like eating ones own lower lip after a long day at the dentist.  But the noodles and broth was ok.

Dessert was exciting, mostly because the menu really did not give any indication of what we were about to eat (and there was not any employee in the restaurant who spoke a word of English).  I ordered the Meat White Ball Soup and David had the Fuzhou Style Eight Treasure Rice.  They are in the photo.  The rice was sweet with walnuts and 6 other things that David and I could not agree on.  The soup was amazing.  It might have looked like a bowl of testicles, but they were warm peanut candies.  Candy soup. Wow.

If you are still reading go back and look at the menu.  "County Style" gets only one item translated into English.  On the other side of the menu there is an entire category that is not even translated into English.  Eight items, no English, not even the heading.  Nothing, Nada, Nil.  Robert Sietsema from the Village Voice got to try these foods, he said, "The second item in the section involved a much tastier broth teeming with wads of beef, dried mushrooms, and pungent Chinese celery, undermining the popular supposition that the dishes that remain untranslated are the ones that might seem weird to Westerners."  Chow.com actually posted an appeal to have the menu translated. No luck yet.

I guess that the defamation of "mystery meat"

There seem to be two Best Fuzhou Restaurants, we went to the one at 71A Eldridge St