Roast pork and butthole pleasures (Wah Fung No. 1 Fast Food)

Here's a somewhat difficult to answer question: how much is good tasting food worth to you? I realize there's a few different ways you can qualify the cost of food, whether it's monetary value, distance traveled, or wait time... but let me offer you another way of quantifying the cost of a meal - your health. Now I'm not talking about getting herpes from eating a sandwich or anything drastic like that, what I mean is... would you eat something that's breathtakingly delicious if it meant that there was a 50/50 chance you'd also get a free side of mudbutt? This is the dilemma that plagues me about Wah Fung's roast pork over rice. It's a dish that has a lot going for it... it's cheap, it's plenty filling, and tastes delightfully sexual - satisfying me in ways that only pork can - but it has a menacing side to it as well. The same gloopy grease that makes this dish taste oh-so-good also has a tendency to "unleash the warrior within." Some real black swan shit going down.

Listen, if you enjoy having full control of your rectal muscles, then maybe Wah Fung's roast pork over rice isn't your thing. Not me though, I like living life dangerously, and if it means I get to put some dope-ass Chinese roast pork in my mouth while doing it - that's just icing on the cake. Remember, according to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, "life is about love and passion... it is not about the butthole pleasures," and I am positively smitten with Wah Fung's pork over rice.



Before I continue creaming myself over this dish, there is one thing that annoys me. The price. I probably sound like an asshole complaining about something that costs $3, and maybe I am, but I am absolutely livid with this change. When I was still a wee undergrad at Columbia a few years ago, this shit cost $2.50. Yeah. The cost-value function was insane. Then all of a sudden it was $2.75. Now it's $3? Pretty soon it's going to cost $3.25. I don't know how I'd feel about that... probably hurt and lonely. Definitely devastated.



I guess I should probably talk about the food now. For $3, this dude right here will fill a small aluminum box and shove it full of rice. I'm sure at some point the rice is/was fluffy, but he packs that shit in tighter than an FCC lattice (can't get no more efficient than that bro). Then he takes some cabbage and broccoli and layers it on one side... I guess to make people think they're eating a well-balanced meal (it's really not). Whatever, those are trivial details... it's at this point that mr. pork goes apeshit. He'll pull slabs of meat out from a tray that's filled with the honey/grease sauce and go "Yan Can Cook" on it. Surprisingly... he still possesses all 10 of his fingers. The box gets padded with a 1" thick layer of pork and finished with a ladle full of sauce (read: grease). It is basically a brick's weight of rice and meat in a to-go container. It is beautiful, and it is a spectacle to behold, I swear.



If you've never had Chinese roast pork before... you're missing out. You really are. While I can't actually tell you how it's made, I can tell you that it's some pretty sick stuff. If I had to rate it on a scale of awesome from 1 to 10, it would be past bacon. That's how good it is. As for what it is? It's usually a fairly fat cut of meat that gets roasted until the fat renders off and crisps the skin, it's normally coated in some sort of sweet oily concoction that can only be described as magical, and it's almost always red. Don't ask me why, I don't know... it just is. In the end it really doesn't matter, Chinese roast pork has a certain sweet savory complex that delivers a disgustingly rich flavor profile all at a very reasonable price.

So back to the question at hand... is the juice worth the squeeze? Oh yes.

Wah Fung No. 1 Fast Food
79 Chrystie St # A, New York, NY 10002