Dining Out, Event, Holiday, Lunch, Manhattan, Manhattanville, Quick Post, Upper West Side, Various LocationsKerry Alaric CheeseboroFebruary 01, 2014aromatics, Asian, burger, chili, chili oil, Chinese, cilantro, cumin, Dining Out, Dinner, dough, dumplings, event, flatbread, garlic, hand-pulled, hand-ripped, holiday, jalapeno, lamb, Lunch, Manhattan, Manhattanville, noodles, skin, spicy, Szichuan, Upper West Side, UWS, Various Locations, Xi'an Famous FoodsComment

No Horse Play

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I WAS ALL QUITE SIMPLE actually. What better way to celebrate the new Chinese Year of the Horse than to enjoy my favorite Chinese food chain in the city, Xi'an Famous Foods, now with a new outpost finally within a few minutes trek, just a crosstown bus ride away from me.

And although I did have my favorite dishes since MY FIRST VISIT TO THE INITIAL MANHATTAN LOCATION 4 YEARS AGO, I decided I would switch things up for this special holiday.

I couldn't possibly skip the spicy cumin lamb burger, one of the joint's signature and most popular dishes. But instead of the lamb offal soup—whose richly delicious gamines and layered levels of heat would have been the perfect panacea to such a chilly winter afternoon, I instead chose to dine on the pork "zha jiang" noodles and on some sweet and sour lamb dumplings.

This Chinese food's divination is from the particular provence of Xi'an in northwestern China, and its indigenous cuisine relies heavily on cumin, chili, spicy hot Szichuan peppercorns, hand-"ripped" noodles, and hot oils. You can't eat most things on the menu without breaking into a slight sweat. Or without having something absolutely rife with delicious flavors.

So, as expected, the lamb burger featured tender lamb meat, heavily spiced but never overly so. It has some onions and jalapeños mixed in, and all that goodness is held together once press-toasted in fresh flatbread.

The noodles are properly a little gummier than most other types of noodles, and possess the extra charms of not just absorbing more flavors than most noodles, but also having more of each dish's oil, sauces and spices cling to them. The dumplings cradle nicely spiced meatballs of spiced ground lamb inside pliant but firm and chewy dough. And every dish is complemented with a wealth of herbs, florals, and aromatics to proper round out each rewarding bite.

Supposedly this Year of the Horse signifies a year when "people will stick more to their principles and stand firm." I gladly, still stand firmly behind the unique excellence of Xi'an Famous Foods, well, food.

And now with three shops in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and the original still in Queens, every New Yorker can now easily gallop to a convenient location and enjoy all of the fiery, legit goodness for themselves. And hopefully often as well.