I'd zoomed past the gleaming new restaurant a couple of times on my bike, but it wasn't till the third occasion that I noticed the name: Rong Hang. "What a hook to hang a review on," I blurted out. So the next week, I dragged a crowd of avid Sino-diners to the location, a couple of blocks north of Canal on Eldridge Street, in the heart of Chinatown's Fujianese neighborhood. But when we tried to get in, the manager waved us away, asserting in shaky English that all the tables were reserved—even though the place was more than half-empty.
To make a shaggy-dog story short, I went twice more with groups of friends at various odd hours—in one case, dragging along a fluent speaker of Cantonese ("I can only understand every sixth word," she lamented of the Fujianese dialect). But each time, the story remained the same: No room at the inn. Luckily, on the first occasion, there'd been a helpful local lurking outside; he pointed at a restaurant on the next block and said, "Owned by the same man." Best Fuzhou did indeed have a similar sign and a nearly identical menu, though it was minus some of the more arcane seafood we'd admired in the tanks at Rong Hang.
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