If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere—and perhaps no one knows that better than New York City’s restaurateurs. Now, a new cookbook takes a peek into kitchens across the city’s Asian communities to learn about the people behind some of the most cherished eateries.
Featuring recipes, detailed profiles, and behind-the-scenes photographs from 43 restaurants covering some 18 cuisines across 24 neighborhoods, Made Here is a handsome new tome self-published by Send Chinatown Love, a volunteer-run organization formed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic initially to provide relief to New York Chinatown’s small businesses. Fascinating essays further explore the restaurant-rich Queens neighborhoods of Flushing, Jackson Heights, and Elmhurst; the full, sweat-inducing richness of Thai cuisine; and where New York’s Asian produce comes from (Florida, most likely).
All net proceeds from the cookbook will go toward supporting the community-building efforts of Send Chinatown Love, which since 2020 has surpassed $1 million in donations, donated 60,000 meals, and raised $47,000 for permanent lantern installations in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
The idea was born two years ago as a means to spotlight the group’s small-business partners and take people behind the scenes of some of New York’s most vibrant restaurants. “We work with so many restaurants that don’t really do media and are often camera shy,” says editorial director Elaine Mao. “We wanted to capture [the restaurateurs and kitchen staff] in their natural environments, doing what they love, and then show to the world the stories behind these businesses.”
Her team sought to include as many Asian cuisines as possible across a vast swath of the city. That includes a noodle factory in College Point; a viral purveyor of scallion-pancake burritos that until recently served exclusively from its fire escape; and a spot serving up Cantonese classics in Homecrest, one of the city’s smallest satellite Chinatowns neighboring Sheepshead Bay.
Recipes run the gamut of skill levels, and Mao’s team eschewed making them more accessible or adapting them with easily available ingredients. “There’s been a shift in cookbooks toward not watering recipes down,” she notes. “Some recipes in the book are really out there.”
The pla som (sour fish), for one, from the Upper East Side’s Thai Isan restaurant Zabb PuTawn, involves fermenting a fish for four days unrefrigerated. “Not every home cook is gonna want to do that,” Mao acknowledged. “It’s a very daunting task, but we wanted to have things be true to how the chefs wanted them to be.” Several recipes had never been written down, existing solely in the cooks’ heads and muscle memory; one was transcribed from a video the team shot of the chef narrating as she prepared the dish on site.
Made Here also includes a number of restaurants that have shuttered, both prior to and during the book’s production. It’s an unfortunate reality of the industry, especially in New York, but as Mao observes, “that doesn’t in any way diminish the importance of their stories. Someone came here, built this business, and had this journey. We wanted to show what this meant to them. And some have bittersweet endings or inconclusive endings, which is also very characteristic of the city.”
The 2022 closing of the Queens Center Mall favorite Boc Boc Chicken Delicious, for example, was mourned by many, but, Mao points out, “the owners worked in restaurants for so long and they put their daughter through college.” (In the book, proprietor Ruth Li says proudly of her loyal customers: “I raised a lot of food-court kids, watching them grow from little kids to college kids.”)
Mao was struck by how much history informed the restaurants’ narratives, although perhaps that’s unsurprising given that many are run by immigrants who left their home countries for political and economic reasons. “We weren’t necessarily thinking we’d be going into a story about the transatlantic slave trade when we reached out to La Dinastia, which was getting a lot of viral fame on social media,” she notes. “But then we started looking into the origin of Chino-Latino cuisine and why there were so many Chinese migrants in Latin America. We saw how these different global forces created these fascinating crossovers.”
The goal is for readers to find a point of connection, Mao notes, whether through the recipes or restaurants, and for that to open a gateway to ultimately building a stronger sense of community. “Maybe they feel more comfortable or interested in cooking Asian food or want to learn more about Filipino or Indonesian cuisine and they’ll explore other cookbooks or go to a restaurant,” she says. “We want this book to start conversations and spark something meaningful and lasting.”
Her personal favorite recipe is for pulut inti (glutinous rice with sweet coconut topping) from dessert shop Kuih Cafe. “I didn’t know about this whole genre of Malaysian sweets until I moved to this neighborhood,” she admits. “I grew up in the Bay Area, and we have a lot of Asian food there, so I thought I was fairly aware. But then I came here, and there are all these things I never would have found out about. I had never heard of Chino-Latino cuisine or Indian-Chinese cuisine before. There are just so many things that make New York City really special.”
