Restaurant review, Yi Lan Halal Restaurant--on the Lamb in Flushing.

Flushing's Yi Lan Halal Restaurant is New York's first real Muslim Chinese establishment. While the city has seen plenty of Halal East Asian food (such as Brooklyn's No Pork Chinese Kitchen), these places merely reconfigure Cantonese fare for observant devotees of Islam. By contrast, Yi Lan represents the cooking of the Muslim population of northern China. It resembles restaurants I've eagerly sought out in L.A. and the Silicon Valley, where a small number have flourished over the past decade, characterized by dome-shaped and seeded wheat breads, lots of familiar and unfamiliar seafood prepared in delightful and unusual ways, fist-size dumplings, and assorted lamb cuts that make their way into stir-fries, grills, and salads, sometimes fiery-hot. What a welter of intriguing textures and crazy combinations awaited us at Yi Lan! The so-called dry bean curd with shrimp ($12.95) was anything but desiccated—an oozy swamp of rehydrated tofu that floated like tiny contraceptive sponges in the beige broth, with bobbing shrimp adding tasty nautical notes to an otherwise landlocked dish. By contrast, sautéed sliced lamb ($12.95) proved as dry and gritty as the Gobi Desert, though the cumin-scented squiggles were slicked with enough ovine tallow that they slid down the gullet easily, amid much lip-smacking. And in sea cucumber Shang Dong style ($16.95), jellylike globs of horny undersea worm lurked in a transparent broth hidden by pretty lily pads of yellow omelet—demonstrating, once again, the ubiquity of eggs in the northern Chinese diet.

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