Jook Joint

Before it closed a couple of years ago, the Home Cafe on Broadway was moderately famous as the best place to eat breakfast in Chinatown that wasn’t dim sum. The tiny storefront restaurant was somewhat crowded from morning until mid-afternoon with people slurping things out of bowls. I ate there about once a month, whenever I could find an excuse to be downtown before noon.

It served the usual range of Cantonese stir-fry stuff, but it was really known for kidney stew; for stretchy, smoky chow fun noodles; and for the best jook , Cantonese rice porridge, around.

Jook can be something of an acquired taste--although the flavors are fairly direct, the okra-esque texture is off-putting--but Home Cafe’s was terrific, spiked with shredded green onion tops and crunchy shards of deep-fried won ton skin: hearty stuff. It didn’t have a whole lot to do with the elegant, wan versions commonly ladled from Thermoses on dim sum carts. Splashed down with a plastic tumbler-full of hot tea, the jook there was a real power breakfast, enough complex carbs to slingshot a guy through an honest day’s work. And it was so cheap I felt almost embarrassed paying the check. It may have been too good to last . . . no jook joint has been as nice since, at least not until somebody told me last week about that funny little place at the end of Alpine with no sign in English. Or to be more precise, about the May Flower Restaurant, as it’s listed in the White Pages.

On a quiet corner near the eastern fringe of Chinatown, near the benevolent societies and across the street from the park where elderly Chinese do their early-morning Tai Chi exercises, the May Flower is a modest Cantonese lunch place. Inside, one wall is dominated by a picture window ( from a window seat you might see a funeral parade wind its way past the restaurant, complete with 20 white limos and a hymn-playing brass band), and another wall by a glass display case that holds some barbecue, a few roasted ducks and stacks of Styrofoam cups. Small red religious shrines, piled with oranges, are scattered about the room.

May Flower is where to find perfect Cantonese beef stew, long-braised, anise-flavored chunks of brisket and meltingly tender beef tendon that’s among the richest foods I know, or for plates of sweet, crisp-skinned “village-baked” chicken, or for stewed pig’s trotters that are slithery and delicious. Mustard greens braised with salty oyster sauce are very good. Spare ribs and barbecued pork are not as good. But basically, May Flower is a place to slurp things out of bowls.

If you’ve looked down your nose at won ton since you were a kid, this is the place to try them again, herbed pork balls wrapped around bits of shrimp crunchy enough to remind you of water chestnuts, and in turn wrapped with floppy cloaks of pasta. The won ton, more of them than you can imagine in a $2.50 bowl of soup, bob in deeply flavored stock, along with noodles if you want them, and bits of duck or village-baked chicken or trotters or beef stew or whatever you’d like. Try dabbing a won ton with a little of May Flower’s terrific house-made black bean-chile sauce, or dribbling a little of its fragrant black vinegar into the soup.

You can have your noodles, the dense, eggy kind, without won ton but with the soup, or fried--chow mein--with things like spare ribs with black beans, duck or barbecued pork. (May Flower may do only a few basic things, but it combines them in a lot of different ways.)

And of course, there’s jook , very good jook , thick and savory and shot through with spicy strands of fresh ginger, which comes with basically every combination of stuff--try it with peanuts. Or with village-baked chicken. Or with strips of tripe. Or with the house combination of chicken, shrimp, liver and kidney, which flavors every drop. It’s the jook to have when you think that there’s no place like home.

May Flower Restaurant, 800 Yale St. (at Alpine Street), Chinatown, (213) 626-7113. Open daily, 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Dinner for two, food only, $5-$8.