Fried potato balls at Yunnan Kitchen -- nothing quite like them has ever been seen before, and they are transcendantly yummy!

You think you've experienced all the potato variations that exist in the world: French fries, baked potatoes, curly fries, 'tater tots, potato chips, hash browns, etc., etc. Then something unique comes along, from Lower East Side regional Chinese newcomer Yunnan Kitchen.

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Fork in the Road headed to Kung Fu Tea in the East Village yesterday for a taste of its bubble milk tea ($3). Our verdict: Compared to its East Village bubble tea counterparts, Kung Fu reigns superior.

The shop is owned by Taiwanese management, and unlike neighboring Taiwanese joints T-Kettle and Saint's Alp Tea House, it is strictly a bubble tea shop. No snacks or any other food offerings--just boba.

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Clarissa Wei

Oily all over, white and fluffy on the inside, a deep-fried mantou is hard to come by in the East Village. This was in the appetizer section of Hot Kitchen and disguised under the label "fried little buns." Now with the exception of the American-Chinese food (stay far away from that section), Hot Kitchen has rarely disappointed, so I decided to take my chances. Plus, it was only $3.

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Try to tell the noodles from the tripe.

Every once in a while, a new noodle slips into town. Remember when ramen arrived, not in a trickle but in an avalanche? Or your first bowl of peel noodles stir-fried with egg and baby bok choy at Sheng Wang?

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The Van Dog at Vandaag

Fork in the Road is a big fan of Vandaag--the EV's only Dutch-Scandinavian restaurant--so when it was announced that sausages would be dispensed from a window on East 6th Street in the side of the restaurant, we were there in an instant.

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The picture-perfect beef on weck sandwich at Mile End Sandwich

It's something of a black eye that New Yorker City dwellers have never quite figured out how to make a beef on weck sandwich until now. Mainly because it's a particular specialty of our sister metropolis of Buffalo, New York--both cities lie on opposite extremes of the state like book ends, and we should have taken to the sandwich as avidly as we did to buffalo chicken wings.

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The dish called Soft Boiled Egg at Egg spinoff Parish Hall

When Parish Hall opened late last year as the pricier offshoot of Egg, it wasn't too difficult to tell which direction it would take. The seasonal and local sensibilities of the owners had been written all over the old menu, even as the original egg-centric bill of fare had expanded into lunch and dinner stuff with a Southern tilt. So when the Parish Hall appeared on North 3rd Street, fans of the original wondered what role, if any, eggs would play.

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Alexia Nader

Spicy tuna mazemen

Yuji Ramen, a pop-up noodle shop nestled in a back corner of Williamsburg's Kinfolk Studios, will most likely become your favorite ramen joint come summer. Its specialty dishes feature a style of brothless ramen called mazemen, which is catching on in Tokyo but is still uncommon here. In Yuji Ramen's mazemen dishes, toppings such as slices of spicy tuna, vegetables, and nori ribbons crown noodles bathed in a slightly creamy sauce instead of broth. When the ramen arrives at the table, you admire the presentation, mix everything together, and dig in.

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The best dish we tried was the scrumptious beef taquitos.

Angelo Sosa--the season seven Top Chef contestant who ended up in second place--opened Anejo Tequileria in Hell's Kitchen as chef and partner this past January, focusing on aged tequilas and similar Mexican fermented products. Fork in the Road recently declared the margarita there best in the city, but what's Sosa's food like, you wonder.

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On the left, the Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple slice; on the right, the standard cheese slice. Note how the cheese pulls up from the tip in a dense indigestible mass.

A gastronomic miracle occurred today when Ray's Famous Pizza reopened at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 11th Street in Greenwich Village as Roio's Famous Pizza, as Alexia Nader reported in this morning's Fork in the Road. But the miracle is not that the place reopened, but that it managed to make the pizza taste exactly the same after a hiatus of more than seven months and a name change.

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