A Fan Ti

This place rocks!!! A couple of years ago, after a day’s conference and meeting up with clients, my co-​workers & I ventured to Flushing for a dose of some Chinese Buffet. It was hard trying to get a parking there so after driving around in circles we accidentally made a turn on 41^st Ave, a car was just pulling out… must be our lucky day…
Right next to it was this restaurant… After going around in circles for almost an hour, we were so hungry we just walked in and the place was almost full except for a table that was probably meant for us. When the menu was handed I noticed a lot of lamb dishes which was odd for a Chinese restaurant. I know that in the Northern part of China, there is a fusion of different cuisines based on the different cultures of the people living there. Chinese, Koreans, Muslims…
Lamb dishes of all kinds… dominates the menu… from the Soup Dumplings to the Roasted Lamb, Braised Lamb Chops, Lamb Skewers which aroma filled the room and makes you heighten your appetite more.
For starters we had Banchan… Korean appetizers… well .the owners of the place were originally from Changbai, a region on the border between China & North Korea… that explains it… We had the Lamb Dumplings of course…, The Barbecued Lamb Chunks, Roasted Shank falling out of the bone and Cucumber /​Mushroom salad & Gizzards w/​brown sauce, Steamed Greens. the most amazing meal… it has since been one of my favorite places to go to in Flushing… All my foodie friends love the place and the prices are very affordable… Nice Service,.small but cozy atmosphere. and the most important thing… FOOD WAS EXCELLENT!!!

This place has the quintessential hole-​in-​the-​wall-​no-​frills-​all-​about-​the-​food thing going for it. If you love lamb in all it’s incarnations then this place will not disappoint.
They make lamb dumplings that rival my grandfathers (and that is no easy feat!!).
I found it looking for the cuisine of my birthplace Xinjiang, and although this isn’t exactly a Xinjiang restaurant, the flavors and style of many dishes on the menu were very close.
The lamb skewers aren’t the star of the menu mainly because it is not cooked over coals, you should walk down the street to the Xinjiang BBQ cart for that!!! Now THAT lamb skewer is authentic!!!
But having said that, you can’t win with every item and there are plenty of winners here that more that adequately make up for the sub par lamb skewers.

Lamb is the only baby animal I will eat. Although that is probably a lie, I’m happy to report that A Fan Ti prepares the baby beast in various ways Northern Chinese style… but with a Korean twist. Since this is my first foray into the cuisine, I wasn’t able to distinguish where the food crossed into fusion.
The restaurant has tables of four separated by short walls providing a little privacy while the small grill is housed in the center of room allowing you to smell all the charred meats grilled to order — that also means you’ll walk out of there smelling like BBQ. Towards the back is a private room for larger groups closed off by sliding doors.
The menu offers a large variety of lamb dishes, offal such as brain, kidney and testicles, and some Chinese seafood staples. The Engrish will give you a few laughs but also makes it difficult to figure out what exactly some of the dishes are. There are Chinese translations as well but they weren’t as descriptive either. The banchan they start you off with is nothing special but you’re saving room for what’s to come.
The lamb dumplings here are incredible providing a nice introduction to the intense flavors to come. It wasn’t until I read previous reviews, that I realized we never got the vinegar dip for the dumplings. Fortunately with excellent flavor, there was no need for further enhancing. The dumpling skin was a big flaw — doughy and sticky, causing many of them to break as you pry them apart from each other.
The fatty, tender lamb skewers are a dollar a piece, insanely tasty and if you can handle sweating a bit, ask for spicy and have your nostrils cleared with one bite. It was not until I tasted the non-​spicy skewers that I could distinguish all the spices.
The Needle Mushroom & Cucumber salad with its flaccid strips of vegetables wasn’t as refreshing as anticipated. It helped cut the spice but overall the dish was limp and soggy — perhaps due to the (kimchi?) vinaigrette it was tossed with.
The lamb ribs (4 per order) were no where near as spicy as the skewers, but the spices used highlighted the fatty, fall-​off-​the-​bone meat excellently. There was too much fat marbled in for my taste and I found myself making a mess trying to pick out every bit of meat from the fat.
The lamb noodle soup was a humble offering of comfort food with generous pieces of lamb meat, and a rich, almost milky broth that you may find yourself drinking up. We had to request bowls & spoons so we can share this but when the waitress only brought bowls, we had to send someone to the counter to retrieve those spoons.
My reviews usually focus on the food and I’m one to forgive small instances of poor service or bad aspects of dishes. Unfortunately when these things start to add up I can’t help but take away that extra star. In addition to the broken dumplings, limp veggies, no vinegar sauce, and lack of spoons/​bowls for the soup, we were only given 2 menus for a party of 4 and our 2^nd order of lamb skewers took 15 minutes. It was a packed night and with a small grill this kind of delay is expected. However the least they could do was clear our table of the dirty dishes. Instead they sat there until after we got the skewers and after we paid to leave.
Despite the flaws of the night, A Fan Ti is a delicious treat if lamb is your thing. Hopefully the service was a fluke and when I return I can get my hands on more of the lamb dishes, conch in hot oil, and gizzard skewers.

Everytime I pass this place, I remember that my dad always says, «This place specializes in lamb.» Mentally I’ve had it in my head to try, but even though I really like lamb, it’s something I have to prepare to eat a lot of, especially because so many people do lamb wrong.
A Fan Ti does their lamb awesome.
The room is totally no frills, and the service is weirdly spacey, but the food more than makes up for it. The menu has a lot of dishes (and very, very many typos if you are easily amused) and after we ordered, some banchan was served to us to help whet our appetite.
We ordered:
Lamb skewers: You have to get these. They are cheap as hell ($ 0.99) and the lamb meat is so fatty and tender. The grill them up right in the middle of the room, and they will ask if you want it spicy or non spicy– be forewarned that spicy is really, really spicy, so if you’re weaksauce you might want to avoid ordering spicy. The plain ones are still flavorful and delicious, and actually the lack of spice helps you taste the actual lamb flavor.
Lamb ribs: More fatty, spicy, delicious. FYI the order is huge (4 giant lamb ribs) and super, super fatty. The meat is just falling off the bone and the spice rub is less spicy than the spicy lamb skewers, so it’s more enjoyable.
Lamb dumplings: HUGE order, be warned — while the inside of the dumplings was really awesome and flavorful, 20 dumplings were crowded in the steamer and all of the skins stuck together, making eating the dumpling as a whole quite difficult. However, if you just manage to grab some filling and some skin, yum. These dont even need sauce
Lamb noodle soup: So they brought the soup… without spoons. And when we asked for little bowls, they brought them… without spoons. In any case, when we managed to get the spoons, we thoroughly enjoyed the broth and the lamb, while the noodles themselves were a little bland. They let the broth shine through though, so I enjoyed.
Cucumber and mushroom salad: to break up some of the lambiness we had to have some veggies, and we picked this and I was glad — the crispiness and faint heat of the cucumbers cut through all that rich, fatty, delicious lamb very well.
The portions are very generous and it’s pretty cheap, which is always a plus.

I hesitated to write this review because this place is so good I wanted to keep it all to myself. Then I smacked myself on the head, called me irrational and decreed that it would be a crime to not rhapsodize about the lamb.
If you follow my reviews, you know that I don’t eat beef or pork and that lamb is my «meat» of choice. And if you don’t follow my reviews, well now you know my food issues. I love lamb.
And this place knows how to prepare it. We had lamb ribs, lamb shanks, stir fried, and in dumplings. Each dish was specific in its taste and texture, with cilantro and pepper being the underlying note to all the flavors. Their lamb dumplings had to be some of the best I’ve had in the area, and I can’t wait to go back and get myself a dozen. Yes, I can scarf down a dozen or more lamb dumplings easy. It was almost an overload, but not quite. For variety we added their amazing crab with ginger and scallion sauce, and kimchi fried rice. It was heaven.
We did feast and it was good. If you like lamb and want it prepared beautifully, you should make the trek out to Queens and walk up that quiet side street to this unassuming restaurant and do like we did — feast.

A Fan Ti is a bit hard to figure out. I referenced a Robert Sietsema review from 2005 before going, but this mislead me a bit into thinking this was pure northern Chinese cuisine. When we saw the awning and sat down inside, it appeared we were actually in a Korean restaurant, as the posters and signage were almost exclusively in Korean. Actually, neither is incorrect, as I figured out after speaking with the owners.
They are from Changbai, a region in northeast China that is an autonomous Korean county that borders North Korea and has many immigrants. Obviously there would be a lot of both cultures involved in the food.
A mini-​BBQ sat in the center of the room, but the menu is loaded with seemingly northern Chinese lamb dishes. The staff speaks both Mandarin and Korean to its different customers. Regardless of where and why, our group was pleasantly surprised with the results and especially pleased with a few unique dishes we tried.
At first we were given a small, four-​dish assortment of banchan, the traditional Korean dishes that are brought out at the beginning of the meal. It did not take long before the first delicious dish arrived as well, the black mushroom salad house style ($ 12.99). We started dipping the mushrooms into the bowl of liquid, but were soon told to use the small bowls to create our own concoctions. The soup was cold and involved strong tastes of sesame oil and pepper, was very tangy, and with the mushrooms and cucumbers created a very refreshing dish, even if the temperatures outside were below freezing.
We couldn’t resist the skewers being BBQ’d in the center of the restaurant, tasty and spicy lamb kebabs ($ 0.99 each). They are not quite as good as the Xinjiang cart you can find on the corner of Main Street and 41^st Avenue, but one each was another perfect appetizer.
The braised lamb chop ($ 17.99) was our most expensive, and probably most delicious selection. Once we had each apportioned enough pieces of lamb to satisfy, I wanted to dunk everything else on the table in the rich brown broth. The lamb pieces were tender enough to fall of their bones by gravity, and the stew was definitely appropriate for cold climates.
It was impossible not to want the steamed lamb dumplings ($ 12.99) despite the fact that we knew the other dishes would already be sufficient. We asked for a smaller portion (the only size is 20), but unfortunately that was not happening.
To our amazement and wide eyes, another dish (below) was brought to us free of charge and included the same black mushrooms with an assortment of other vegetables. It was not fully consumed, but very much appreciated to counter our lamb-​heavy table assortment.
It is not hard to find excellent food in Flushing, but A Fan Ti will definitely take a special place in my mind and of course involve many return trips.

I was looking for this Restaurant on Unilocal but couldn’t find it. I was looking for its American Name: BBQ Lamb Restaurant.
This place is all about LAMB!
They season and cook the lamb (skewer, rack, just about any way you want it) on a homemade grill fueled by a propane tank — right in the middle of the restaurant! It smells so good!
They start you off with 4 Banchan Dishes. I love these!
Sprouts, Spicy Peppers, Scallions, and Radish — kimchi style
Our first dish was the Wasabi Noodles. Although the first dish we ordered had a hair in it, they gladly replaced it with a gracious apology. The wasabi was overwhelming and made it difficult to eat without choking. But the Presentation was beautiful. Less wasabi would have made it delicious.
The Conch dished looked huge but we were fooled, it comes on a heaping bed of veggies strategically hidden underneath. Although the dish was good, it was quite pricey considering how much you got.
Dish 3: LAMB DUMPLINGS!
OMG, these were AWESOME! You can actually taste the lamb, unlike other restaurants where it just tastes just some sort of meat. This was singlehandedly the best dish they had although it is not heavily advertised. I would come back just to eat the dumpling and only the dumpling. Mmm! Wow.
Our fourth dish was the «freebie» advertised in the paper. White and Black Moor. This was done beautifully and our second favorite dish. Tasty, flavorful and good for you!
And now for our last dish, rack of Lamb. Oh, this was GOOD… but EXTREMELY fatty. And the owner warns you of this before you order it. It’s about 50% fat. But so good!
All-​in-​all, my family would go back and only order the dumplings as it is the best value and OH SO GOOD!
5 Stars for Lamb Dumplings, 3 for the rest
[Check out my photos of each dish]

We came here for the lamb.
Everyone comes here for the lamb.
This place is easy to find. It’s right next to where we parked our car.
Barley tea, cilantro crab, cilantro lamb, spicy tofu (some cilantro).
Most unique menu of any restaurant in any city ever. We are lucky to have this in Flushing. In America.
Travel there by car. It’s a lot more fun.
Make sure to have your skis and sleeping bag and Clue: Master Detective and everything else that you need when on the road for a month in the winter. No worries about the comfort of backseat passengers.
Don’t look at a map. Ever. Get to Van Wyck. Get off. Take a turn. Turn around. Now you’re in the park. It’s scary. Get to A Fan Ti.
In English, it’s somewhere on Main St. In Mandarin, it’s right next to where you parked your car.

this is my first 5 star and it deserves it. when i first arrived at this restaurant i would not expect the food to be as great as it was. the appetizers were pretty good too. they specialize in lamb and boy were they good at it. my friend and i ordered shrimp $ 16 and lamb $ 17 and they were both delicious. the lamb was cooked to perfection, i couldnt stop eating it, it was sweet and spicy at the same time. the shrimp plate was full of shrimp! it was sweet but not too sweet and it was very beautiful. i was really surprised that the waitress can speak both korean and chinese and it was a really good mix because we both practiced our different languages. the bathroom and décor was clean, so there was nothing about the restaurant to complain about.