There are no petits fours available at Liberty View, on the southern edge of Battery Park City, although you can order classic desserts like red-bean pancakes or, better yet, “eight treasure” rice pudding (sweet, sticky rice molded with red-bean paste, peanuts, and honey dates) and enjoy them outside at little café tables as you look across the turbid waters of the Hudson at the Statue of Liberty. Despite this most American of settings, Liberty View feels more like a modern Chinese restaurant than does anything you’re likely to encounter in Chinatown these days. When you go out to eat at a hot new restaurant in Shanghai, say, or the new neighborhoods of Chengdu, you’ll probably visit a clean little place with calligraphy on the walls, like at Liberty View. Because the old jumble of tenements and crooked alleyways is fast disappearing in modern China, you’ll probably find yourself dining in a faceless modern apartment complex (often by a turbid, slow-moving river) that looks an awful lot like, well, Battery Park City.
Luckily, much of the food at Liberty View, cooked up by a reputable Shanghai chef named Bai Qian, is authentic, too. Being Shanghainese, Bai produces the usual array of soup dumplings, the best of which are stuffed with crabmeat and pork, served on individual soup spoons. Other Shanghai specialties include softly braised pork meatballs (“lion’s heads”) and hot bowls of wontons filled with bits of green vegetable and pork. There’s also a good crispy spring chicken (spooned with a peppery “special” sauce) and a series of excellent fish dishes, like hacked lobster with ginger and scallions, sea bass sprinkled with pine nuts, and crunchy slivers of freshwater eel tossed with baby shrimp, scallions, and a hint of chili oil. The soft-shell crabs are good when they’re in season, and so are the Dungeness crabs, buried under great drifts of chopped, frizzled garlic. The best dessert is the “eight treasure” rice pudding. You won’t find a better example of this sweet, subtle dish in all of Battery Park City, not to mention in the booming suburbs of Shanghai.
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