Northern Tiger

Hudson Eats at Brookfield Place, the giant food court down in Battery Park City, opened a little over a year ago (and we were supposed to post about it so many times before now), but the last kiosk to finish off the collection, Northern Tiger, featuring northern Chinese food, only opened earlier this year. The first weekend of the Women's World Cup had some gorgeous weather, so we decided to bike over and try Northern Tiger to kick off our WWC eating challenge.

The options at Northern Tiger aren't that cheap, but they're not really that different from the prices at the other stands at Hudson Eats. Even though the spots are more similar to fast casual places, all of these food halls and outdoor markets (like Smorgasburg or all the Urbanspace places) can really push the limit if you're trying not to spend more than $10 per item. You can't really compare them to hole in the wall places in, say, Chinatown, because it's just an apples and oranges comparison. Anyway, since we were planning to try out various spots over the course of the day, we decided to just get one shaobing wrap to split ($9).

The shaobing wraps came in 3 options - beef, chicken, and tofu - and consisted of your choice of protein "rolled in our homemade flakey flatbread with a fresh veggie slaw." We chose the Cascun Farm's chicken, and were really curious to see what the wrap would be like. A ate shaobing a lot while growing up, but it's not really the type of thing that one would call a "wrap." (If you want to know more about shaobing, Wikipedia defines it here as a baked, layered flatbread with sesame seeds on top.)

When we opened up the wrapper, what we got reminded us of an open-ended Chinese burrito. Instead of the shaobing A remembered, this was more like a scallion pancake used as a wrapper. Inside the wrap, we found chicken, cabbage, scallions, carrots, cilantro, and hoisin sauce. Everything was really tasty and the flavors were well-balanced. Further, the vegetables were all fresh and crunchy, so the wrap felt nice and light. The scallion pancake-like wrapper worked better (in our opinion) than tortillas do in burritos, and we loved the unique texture that brought to it. The wrap was also a good size, fairly filled, and in our opinion, worth the price. We could each definitely see ourselves eating one for lunch and being at least mostly filled up.

We really liked this wrap and kind of wished we had gotten 2 of them, so we could try either the beef or the tofu as well. We would definitely go back to Northern Tiger for another one of these wraps, and maybe to try some other dishes as well (like maybe the zha jiang mian). This is a great addition to Hudson Eats!