Summer tastes like mango (and vice versa)
Breaking news: I recently moved in with my girlfriend. So far, it’s going well, despite quickly resolved squabbles about double-dipping and the lost laundry room key. (She had it last.) But maybe you can help us with our little yellow problem? I love fresh mango. She can’t stand them. Not the texture, the fibers in her teeth or — worse of all — the sight of her boyfriend over the sink, nibbling a pit like a dog with a Christmas bone. This summer — mango season, to the rest of us — I set out to sway her with my favorite mango treats from across the city, occasionally hauling them home in the fastened basket of a Citi Bike. Did I convert her? Well, no. But I did find you some wonderful desserts in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
’Tis the seasonEach spring, our city debates which Thai market makes the best mango sticky rice in town. Since Pata Market appeared in Elmhurst, though, it has really been the only answer. The mangoes — ripe Ataulfos with Minion-yellow flesh — are carved into skinny slices by one employee, before being shuffled down the assembly line toward sticky rice still warm from the steamer. Everything is tucked into a plastic takeout tray with coconut cream and a pouch of puffed mung beans, as crunchy as corn flakes. Pata Market has long sold mango sticky rice at street festivals around town, but this is the first year the grocer has offered it in store. The first week it went on sale in March, Naratip Klinsrisuk, one of the owners, was happy to sell 30 orders in a day. Now, in a busy summer week, he can make as many as 2,000 trays of sticky rice, and needs five full-time employees on weekends to meet the demand. Let’s hope for a warm September, so M.S.R. season can last a little longer. 81-16 Broadway (81st Street), Elmhurst, Queens
The Big Gulp if it slayedMango overload? No such thing at Eldridge Street Store, where all that’s missing from its 32-ounce tubs of freshly slushed mango is more mango in the form of pearly boba, available for an extra dollar. The Eldridge Street Store has barely been open a month, but all over the Chinatown, customers can be seen sipping from its plastic quart containers, like Carmy in “The Bear.” “We buy real fruit in the neighborhood and purée it ourselves,” said Kenney Zhang, who runs the shop with his sisters. Before opening Eldridge Street Store this summer, the siblings ran a sneaker shop at the same address called Solely Tea. There is still a pair looming over the register, but the slim storefront is now filled with salvaged signs from shuttered Chinatown restaurants. (Remember New Double Dragon and Sun Lin Garden? Eldridge Street Store remembers.) Arrive after 5 p.m., when the kitchen opens for dinner, and you can pair your slushie with peanut noodles — a Fujianese specialty — and Chino-Latino chicken showered in garlicky Dominican wasakaka, a taste of our changing Chinatown. 111 Eldridge Street (Broome Street), Chinatown, Manhattan
Nieves run in the familyHard work doesn’t even begin to describe what Fidel Cortés and his family accomplish each week under their tented street stand across from Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick. Several times a week at Nieves Cortés they slosh together fruit juice and water in steel silos and place the silos in buckets filled with salted ice. Then they spin and spin and spin the silos, inching toward nieves with every rotation, until they plunge a wooden oar into its depths, like a rower in the homestretch. “How else would we make them?” said Mr. Cortés, who learned the ropes from his father. Nieve means “snow” in Spanish, but the texture here is somewhere between Philadelphia water ice and quality sorbet, with bits of lime zest or coconut hiding inside. The lush mango nieves has the perfect amount of chunky fruit, beating out all of the flavors I’ve tried. (So far, that includes coconut, melon, lime, watermelon and pineapple.) Ask for a swirl of ruby red Chamoy, and you’re two-thirds of the way to a mangonada. 282 Knickerbocker Avenue (Suydam Street), Bushwick, Brooklyn
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