Gathering Sonoran Ingredients in Manhattan

We were barreling down Lexington Avenue with shopping bags that were getting progressively heavier with limes (on sale), green onions, wonton skins, hi-chews, lap-cheong, spare red envelopes. There was no smoked ham hock to be found but Chinese Chorizo Project founder and chef-artist Feng-Feng Yeh has called ahead at Kalustyan’s, for our final ingredient.

Kalustyan’s is an extraordinary global emporium of grains, legumes, spices – aisle after aisle of neatly packaged cardamom pods or dal varieties loom overhead — an analog of the skyscrapers outside.

It turns out that there was nothing you couldn’t find (do) in the city, including tepary beans, destined for the breakfast burrito special Eric See, chef-owner of Ursula, was serving up in two days for Sunday brunch.

Our drought-resistant bean, along with the chiltepin, and of course, the Chinese chorizo — the magnetic ingredient at the center of the Project’s culinary storytelling — were the emblematic Sonoran-desert born foods bearing Borderland tales to the east coast, the star characters in the first ever (Mini) Chinese Chorizo Festival in NYC, a series of pop-ups presented in collaboration with the city’s chefs, served up just in time for the tail-end of Lunar New Year festivities.

Welcome to Kalustyan’s, a Manhattan landmark for specialty foods since 1988 (Photo by Jacqueline Barrios)

In many ways, the Mini-Festival was a homecoming for Yeh, who spent close to two decades forging an aesthetic community and repertoire in the frenetic crucible of high fashion, food and queer nightlife. As Yeh recounted the feverish late night sessions running up samples for her own line or her media shoots expressing a playfully ironic and unapologetically hedonistic counterculture to so called “wellness” industries, I tracked the ways the Chinese Chorizo Festival we have come to know in Tucson, is in fact creatively tethered to the incessant (re)invention transpiring in this most populous city in nation.

Like its own namesake, the Festival, and its founder, are born of travel. The chorizo (in a purple Trader Joe’s freezer bag, nicely ensconced in dry ice), and all that it has created in Tucson, was in flight. Desert beings continued their migratory histories, transurban prodigies who were authoring the next tale of two cities.

Tucson Ingredients Meet New York Kitchens

What was it like to experience the festival, remade by hands and hearts of NYC-based collaborators? A rush of deliciousness! I ended up tasting Gem Home’s Chinese Chorizo roll the next day, cold from the fridge and still in its take-out box. Still, the first bite was an explosion of flakes, layers of airy sesame-bedecked pastry wrapped the Chinese chorizo filling inside, served with a rhubarb duck sauce. Its accompanying bright acidic herb salad was revelatory, cutting the roll’s substantial portion into lucid bites. I remember it now, and the flash of wintry light streaming through Brooklyn windows as I ate it, recalling the snow from the blizzard still piled in drifts on sides of road and bases of trees, as the palo verde burst into bloom back home.

Serving up the Chinese Chorizo Roll at Gem Home in NYC (Photo by Sarah Tang) Serving up the Chinese Chorizo Roll at Gem Home in NYC (Photo by Sarah Tang) A Lunar New Year Celebration Across the City

I got to the pastry late because Feng-Feng and I split up. I ran to catch Super Saturday in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the traditional extravaganza of lion dance and confetti held the Saturday after New Year when troupes representing various benevolent associations and martial arts studios take over the streets.

Banners, cabbage leaves, acrobatic moves and irresistible drumming were at every corner. The scale of the celebration was immense, one was surrounded by reverberation and families, one imagined perhaps what it might be like to be inside a lion’s head, glimpsing the world through fluttering eyes.

Dumplings and Pop-Ups in Brooklyn

I made it back just in time for the pop-up for Lise & Vito for Feng-Feng’s handmade Chinese Chorizo dumplings (served with corn and green chili, green onion, crema, lime, fried shallots), where I slung Chinese Chorizo fliers at the Brooklynites on Nassau Avenue. They were alternately wary, friendly or bemused.

The key was to fearlessly look at one’s fellow urban citizen in the eye and keep it short: “Chinese Chorizo Special Tonight Only.” Nothing like eye contact to obligate sidewalk fellowship (see Chapter 3 of Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “The uses of sidewalks: contact”). In a panic, one could always bleat out “Dumplings!” In this, I copied Kristin Rose Pike, who I joined outside Lise & Vito as co-Chinese chorizo salesmen.

Cocktails Highlight Cross-Border Collaboration

Kristin is the creative force behind the Canadian wine and spirits import project Northern Rose Selections, the mini-festival’s wine and cocktail partner. Among some of the arresting memories of the festival will be of Chinese Chorizo sensitively delivered via the liquid vehicles of Kristin’s curated products from “north of the border” — the surprising funk of whey eau-de-vie, the sea salt tang Fundy Gin, the warm juiciness of Strawberry Rhubarb Moonshine. This festival was a tale of two (literal) Borderlands. 

Special at Lise & Vito featuring handmade Chinese chorizo dumplings and a Northern Rose cocktail (Photo by Feng-Feng Yeh)

The next day, in keeping with the cross-cultural theme of our travels, I hurried to see the immensely moving Wilfredo Lam exhibition, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, at the Museum of Modern Art, transported by the work of an artist so undoubtedly representative of the Festival’s concept of solidarity. I saw his mixed Afro-Cuban and Chinese ancestry surging through the Surrealist riot of color, line and mythic beings displayed across multiple rooms.

I found out, appropriately enough for the Year of the Horse, about his use of the femme cheval, the horse-woman drawn from Afro-Cuban religious beliefs. As I stepped out into the cold, following the trail of my newly installed MTA app to catch the L train back, lingering in my brain were the voices of the audio tour, how this being symbolized the possessive encounter between devotee and the orishas, spiritual amalgamation as hybrid form.

A Sonoran Breakfast Burrito in Brooklyn

I arrived right when Ursula closed to the public, in time to see the aftermath of a successful brunch service, the staff relaxedly sitting at the tables, camaraderie and affection draped over their conversation and manner, remains of many cakes (we were celebrating Feng Feng’s birthday).

I dug into the burrito that Feng-Feng has again saved for me — a still warm load of creamy yellow egg, tepary beans with their assertive shape, shreds of hash brown (which I learned is the signature of the New Mexican breakfast burrito.) 

The New Mexican-style breakfast burrito at Ursula with tepary beans and Chinese chorizo. (Photo by Feng-Feng Yeh)

The day winded down, and we enjoyed the last bit of the Northern Rose cocktail (“The Chinese Chorizo Thief”) from the Ursula pop-up — jamaica, osmanthus, Chinese Chorizo syrup and Amermelade apéritif — from a plastic takeout container. That evening we celebrated Feng-Feng’s birthday at Frijoleros whose array of starters imparted the textural delicacy of Mexican food combinations — a lovely tuna tiled above a thin slab of chicharrón, a slide of mayo and soy sauce in between; the crunch of chapulines in the guacamole.

These juxtapositions were carried over in the mains of the evening — impressively, Chinese Chorizo is featured three ways, beef, chicken and fish. Cool cucumber aguachile topped a grilled red snapper, with chorizo rendered up in crispily smoky bites slicked by the pool of pipián verde on which the fish was plated.

Still, at one moment, this study of fresh contrasts became a background to the spoonful of deeply familiar pinto beans, fat and round beneath the Chinese chorizo butter roasted chicken. 

The birthday spread at Frijoleros included all three featured mains: Pollo Asado, Mixiote de Res, and Pescado Asado (Photo by Feng-Feng Yeh)

As we return to Tucson, I reflected on my frantic search for the “Celebrating the Year of the Horse” exhibition at the palatial labyrinth that is Met Fifth Avenue. Tucked away in Gallery 207, I had to be directed twice by attendants to find it, one who said, “prepare to be disappointed.” In a way, she was right, ceramic horse figurines encased inside vitrines do not a celebration make.

I read on its didactic: “Among the most celebrated animals in Chinese popular cultures, horses also appear in the spiritual realm where they serve as the noble steeds of door gods — guardians believed to bring joy, protection, and prosperity to the household.”

“Door gods.” It made me realize that celebrating the Year of the Horse in New York, and in any city, was only disappointing if one missed the gallery of its streets, its artists, its chefs, its laborers, its homemakers and placekeepers. For me, seeing the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) diaspora out in full force, serving up its manifold identities, along with the Mini-Festival, was breathtaking.

They rush into recollection even now: the Dong Bei salad and clarified soymilk punch at Wenwen, the white kimchi that infused the dongchimi martini at Nudibranch, the vision of Sarah Tang, Feng-Feng’s cousin, seen for the first time through a window at Somedays Bakery, dwarfed by an enormous dough sheeter, the lion dancers that supplicated at Paper Sons cafe, the “emergency” sisig at Binondo, how I sped-read of Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings at the nook at Yu & Me Books, that I found Wu’s Wonton King and slurped its famous wonton-soup (on the way to the F train, which led to the G train transfer), how I beheld the startlingly bulbous puff of pastry above the curry lamb pot pie at Kru, how I stood outside Wing On Wo, the oldest continuously operating store in in Chinatown, while I snapped a picture of the multiple generations of a family with deep roots in Manhattan’s Chinatown — I had come to visit my friend and meet her mother and new baby, aunts and uncles, siblings, one of whom is a co-founder of the non-profit Think!Chinatown.

“Guardians believed to bring joy to the household.” The collaborators of the Mini-Festival were truly door-guardians. Before the official start of the series, I witnessed, and was struck by, the choreography of Ursula’s staff between service. It was a panoramic view from my countertop chair – peppers were being charred, tamales were being assembled, instructions for how to form cabbage rolls or when to add the salt as much part of the camaraderie as the teasing and checking in.

Food, Community, and the “Angels on Your Pillow” Series

By the doorway, Eric was holding a painting, and I heard him say he wanted to recreate a sense of one’s home for the dining room. I asked him who Ursula is, and of course, she is his grandmother, her portrait presiding over diners and servers, bartenders and cooks alike.

He told me that Feng-Feng’s pop-up was actually a part of a series he called “Angels On Your Pillow,” whose chefs were all serving unique takes on the burrito to raise funds for Border Kindness/Bondad Frontero, “providing asylum seekers, migrants, refugees, and the displaced with comprehensive services that include foods, shelter, clothing, medical care, and legal services.”

Tucson’s Chinese Chorizo Travels Far

He had made a series of stickers evoking the airbrush-and-starry-background vibes of 90s’ mall pictures, and he told me of growing up in New Mexico, how he caught the send-off “Angels On Your Pillow” that accompanied late night song dedications on the radio. On the flight, Feng-Feng showed me an image of a menu from Briscola Trattoria, one of three Italian concepts by Chef Silvia Barban. Barban, a friend of Eric, had taken Ursula’s left-over chorizo and turned it into a Dan Dan tonnarelli (parmigiano-shallot gremolata and a lemon olive oil) for a Lunar New Year collaboration with Chef Christine Lau, former Chef at Chino Grande. From the picture I imagined the dust of parmigiano and spicy sausage, the bite of the nest of noodles, the fragrance of the lemon. The Chinese chorizo was a gift that keeps giving, a delicious ghost we kept tasting.

Collect all the stickers commemorating the “Angels on Your Pillow” Burrito Series collaborators at Ursula (Photo by Jacqueline Barrios) Borderlands Stories Continue

Eric’s doorway, like many we passed through, were the blessed portals of this particular NYC Lunar New Year. Each space we visited reminded me of course of Tucson’s 100+ Chinese-owned grocery stores and their unique story of cross-cultural reciprocity and care.

Part of the magic of Chinese Chorizo Project was the way Yeh, and the community she solicited, attuned you to the incomparable shapeshifting, and unexpected recognition, that migratory life brings. It is no surprise that this Tucson ingredient traveled, bringing its spirit to some of the most generous citizens of our cities — those who grew, made, prepared, and served our collective meals. NYC was the first of hopefully many stops in this itinerary of multiple and surprising homecomings. 

The Lunar New Year collaboration at Briscola Trattoria featured a Chinese chorizo “primi” in the form of a Dan Dan tonnarelli. (Photo by Feng-Feng Yeh)

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