When you stop by Andrew Chen’s new Monkey King Banana Stand, which inhabits the original Monkey King Noodle Company’s stand-alone outpost with its sliding, food-truck-like window that had dispensed goodness in the form of hand-pulled noodles since 2013 (the noodle shop has relocated to a larger space a few hundred yards down the street), get the egg tarts, rich, flaky pastry in a cluster like a flower petal around a custard center yellow as lemon curd, with a pretty break-line.
The eggs tarts remind me of the ones I loved in San Francisco, when I used to stop by the Golden Gate Bakery on a weekend afternoon and walk around eating them while they were still warm. Chen has family ties to Taiwan, Beijing, and Hong Kong, and the Banana Stand is a tribute to treats you’d find in bakeries there.
Souffle cheesecake is baked in individual molds about the size of a hockey puck. The texture throws you, as does the flavor, milder than you think, like ricotta cheesecake. It looks like air, light as angel-food cake, but is both feather-light and dense, a strange feat of structural integrity that at any moment you feel might collapse on itself.
When I stopped by, they were caramelizing pineapples. Their pineapple tart is a compact square of thick, buttery dough around a jammy filling, chewy with concentrated pineapple flavor. The pineapples to which they have access are not as dense and sweet as the Taiwanese varieties, Chen says, and so a lengthy caramelization replicates the flavors they’re seeking. The result is outstanding.
Pile these into a box, and you’ve got a parcel of sunshine.
Ice cream is the other thing on offer. The flavors, intense and refreshing, work well as a complement to the pastries. Green tea is intense, almost like a green tea sorbet. Gunpowder green tea joins matcha, adding a punch to the usual smooth astringency. It’s closer to the original drink, as is the Vietnamese coffee ice cream, light and bold. Young coconut ice cream is made with fresh young coconut pulp and tasted like the young coconut drinks you find easily at Asian grocery stores. Also try the blueberry and roasted banana.
