Made Here: Recipes & Reflections From NYC's Asian Communities

Send Chinatown Love is a project that supports merchants in NYC’s many Chinatowns, which have been devastated by the global pandemic, surges in anti-Asian sentiment, and a loss of foot traffic and rising expenses.

Made Here is a community cookbook drawn from restaurants, bakeries, and food vendors in NYC. It profiles more than fifty businesses and offers a recipe from each. It also opens its reach to include contributions from other Asian communities which have been similarly affected.

Throughout the book, sidebars describe different community centers and traditions, from street food to outdoor produce markets.

Among the many contributions to the book are:

• Lo bak go (turnip cake) from Golden Unicorn in Manhattan
• Ròu sōng juăn (pork floss rolls) from Catherine Bakery in College Point, Queens
• Scallion pancake plantain, egg, and cheese breakfast tacos from Forsyth Fire Escape in Manhattan
• Nan gi kaukswe thoke (rice noodle salad with chicken and herbs) from Burmese Bites in Elmhurst, Queens
• Vegan longevity noodles from Fat Choy in Manhattan
• Hatba (a seafood corndog) from Insa in Gowanus, Brooklyn

The ambition behind Made Here is so expansive that in their enthusiasm to include as much as possible the editors sometimes rely on small text sizes to get as much as possible into the book’s 352 pages. This is more of an issue in the sidebars than in the recipes, though.

Valuable for what it documents and hopes to preserve.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.