M & T Restaurant

I would give it 4 stars for food but the service was lacking. I hope that this was a less than normal occurance. I would go back to try it again.

Possibly the worst chinese food I’ve had in a long time. I came by M & T after passing on an Indian restaurant that seemed too filthy to eat at. In hindsight, I probably should’ve eaten there. .. okay maybe not, but I definitely shouldn’t have eaten at M & T.
If there was any way to definitively measure how good a chinese restaurant is, that would be by their fried rice, and sadly, M & T fails terribly in that category. The rice was both gummy and mushy. It doesn’t seem as though their wok was hot enough when they started firing it; the end result being an extremely sub-​par fried rice. Another item I ordered was their spicy sliced beef, which was chewy to the point where it was barely edible.
One of my fellow reviewers mentioned that the people of Qingdao (their specialty cuisine) are more drinkers than eaters, and it shows in M & T’s food. I would like to give them another try, but I would be hard-​pressed to when a restaurant can’t even execute a simple fried rice.

Through first time i tried it was ok. The second time was the last time. How do you mess up simple soup? Will NOT RETURN

it’s a small restaurant but a good one. their specialties are Qingdao dishes and they are REAL, the owners are from Qingdao and the dishes are authentic especially the sea food.

Second trip to M&T was even better.
Came this Saturday with two couples for late lunch. One of the girls is from Qingdao so she did the most ordering. Since Qingdao is by the sea, we ordered mostly seafood. We tried 7 dishes, including 4 entrees: Cabbage & Shrimps (Bai Cai Da Xia), Qingdao Style Fish Soup (Lao Ban Yu), Jelly Fish & Kidney (featured dish in Michelin Guide), Stir-​fried Clams (Bao Chao Ge Li), 1 appetizer, Bean Jellies (Liang Fen) and two plates of dumplings. We skipped rice as Shangdong is famous for northern China style dumplings. Of course we also had Qingdao Beer.
The food was GREAT. We swept the dishes literally. My favorite was the Jelly Fish & Kidney. The kidney was super soft and the baby jelly fish was crispy and fresh. One couple love the cabbage & shrimps for their special sauce. I enjoyed the soup a lot.
The service was good as always. The host provided great recommendations based on our individual requests.
Bill came out only $ 80ish. Everyone was happy.

tiny little place but great food. definitely get the fried pork in sweet and sour sauce… it’s heavy on the vinegar but holy cow, is that good!

This is a crazy place. Qingdao cuisine. They like to use the phrase «my hometown» a lot, its very charming. I had the sliced cucumber with pig face and enjoyed it enough to be looking forward to my next visit to this strange restaurant. The walls are covered in pictures, the translations are laughable…

M & T is more workaday than friendly, but still retains a certain charm of its own on Kissena Boulevard. It focuses on the cuisine of Qingdao, a city in Shandong province, just north of Shanghai. I really like the cheap kitchen cabinets that are used for storage above the cash register, and I think you would have a lot of fun if you could read all the Chinese signs on the walls.
Also, I’m really happy to have any free appetizer, and the little mixed assortment of mushrooms, celery, carrots, and peanuts made for good nibbles before our dishes came.
From seeing it on the posters outside, I knew I would want the farmer style chicken ($ 9.99), a dark-​sauced comfort food stewed with peppers and onions. It has a very salty (yet nice) taste, but all the pieces are on the bone and hard to get any substantial pieces of meat from.
The highlight of the meal for me was the sauteed leek with squid ($ 11.99), which had a nice combination of tart and tangy flavors. The squid could have been a bit fresher, but I found myself picking at it the longest of anything.
Another dish I could not pass up was the rainbow fish and lamb ($ 12.99) which unfortunately was not the greatest combination. Both meats tended to have the texture of bad Chinese takeout, and while the lamb was edible, the fish was hardly. In Chinese, the word «fresh» derives from combining the characters of lamb and fish, so thus a new, albeit strange, combination dish has arisen.
The sauteed clam meat with egg ($ 8.99) was a favorite of a couple diners at our table but was definitely not mine. I found the dish too clam-​y, too fishy, just too much to overcome the appearance which made it want to taste like an omelet.
The city has enough Qingdao restaurants that I doubt M & T will become the most recognized, but it is still a cuisine that not many people know, so worth trying out.

The new influx of Northern Chinese into Flushing has lead to a variety of new restaurants which differ greatly from your Shanghai/​Cantonese/​Taiwanese fare that you usually find here.
The cuisine here is from Qingdao, China… yes the same place where you get Tsingdao Beer. In fact some of their menu is imported from the area such as the sea intestines and the very green looking tea they offer (much better than pretty much ALL of Flushing restaurants but still free)
If you do not speak Chinese the place will be a little intimidating, but do not fear because the owners are VERY friendly and will help you through the experience as best they can. Not to mention there is a huge picture mural of the dishes on the left side of the restaurant and the menu had pictures as well.
The décor of the restaurant is pretty bad, but very authentic China… it is just a small room cramped with tables which connects to a Kitchen, and when you go here all the people around you will be from the mainland of China, drinking and eating.
Some highlight dishes are:
1. sea intestines — a marine animal only found in that area of China/​Japan in the yellow sea
2. egg/​clam (razorbackclam) stir fried with chives
3. Qingdao style noodles
4. pumpkin pancakes
5. Stir fried Squid
The food here is very different from what Americans and even Chinese people perceive as Chinese food because of the regional fare they serve. Much of the food when it is cooked has a heavy flavor of garlic and many of the cold dishes that are served have a tangy sweet vinegar taste to it.
Definitely worth the try and would love to go back with someone if only to show them a new experience
Note* — They are open pretty late, even though they say they close at 11 if you give them a call they are almost certainly open till 12 but be warned you will meet a drunken store owner who is smoking.

everything was banginggg, like jenna haze banging. i tried sea intestines\leeks, qingdao noodles, razor clams with scrambled eggs, and pumpkin pancakes. loads of flavors i never had before. the owners a cool guy, the place isn’t dirty, and it’s not expensive. what more could you ask for.

I really like the ambiance here. It’s a total neighborhood joint and I love seeing it full every night.
I recommend the sweet potato pancakes and the cabbage with shrimp heads. Sounds gross but it is deeeeeeelicious! Prices are great, the proprietors are really friendly, but its not that English-​friendly. Its hard to determine what’s on the menu, figure out what it is your getting, and if you don’t understand Chinese it’ll be difficult to find your way around. We ordered a couple dishes on their recommendation that we didn’t really enjoy, but unfortunately I don’t know how what they were to post them here.
Prices are great.

Who knew such a cuisine existed?
Qingdao food doesn’t fit neatly into the four main schools of Chinese cooking. It’s not really spicy like Sichuan or Hunan food. Naw, well maybe except for the Qingdao chilled noodles with vinegar, garlic and a secret kick of chili. And its not really sweet like Cantonese food. Well, except for the stewed tofu with mushrooms. It’s not terribly sour, except that everything seems to have a cut of vinegar offsetting any taste of soy sauce. And it’s not supposed to be that salty, although the abundance of pickling seems to contradict.
M&T Restaurant serves up a unique/​bizarre mix of regional Chinese food, and the experience is definitely one to be had. All of the dishes were super weird and super good.
Case in point: chilled fatty pork with vinegar, garlic and ginger sprinkled on top. Sounds weird, but imagine the saltiness of the pork, melting with the fatty bits, all cut by the acidity and kick of the vinegar/​garlic. Perhaps one of my favorite dishes.
The Qingdao noodles (or «pasta» as listed on the foreigner-​friendly picture menu on the wall) were chilled and opaque, served in a vinegary brine, with a very neutral and refreshing taste. I was told by my Chinese friend and dining partner that seaweed was used in some form to season the dish. It tasted as fresh as a walk by the beach (Qingdao is by the ocean after all). Only con was that the vinegar and raw garlic was a bit overpowering for me (and my breath still reaks because of it).
Dried tofu with Qingdao mushrooms were simple but had a real «tebie weidao» or particular flavor as they say in Mandarin. The featured mushrooms are rare in the States and when combined with a bit of soy sauce and oil, they bring out an amazing woody flavor.
Sauteed squid with jiucai (garlic shoots) marked a land-​meets-​water dish. The garlic shoots were woody, almost as if they had been freshly picked from some Flushing garden (doubtful!), while the little squids were so soft and tender that one could discern little hints of their salt water origins.
The pickled starters sound boring but were actually an amazing accompaniment — particularly when paired with a tall bottle of Qingdao beer. Light, refreshing beer combined with pickled celery and peanuts, generous crunchy bits of lotus roots, and strips of cucumber. Perfect to pick at.
I am a fan of M & T, despite my fear that all of the blog coverage will spoil it. Go now while you can. [To be fair, I do read blogs, so I shouldn’t knock them. In fact, I wouldn’t have known about M & T if I didn’t stalk Jeff O’s blog and read Judy K’s reviews. Thanks guys! You’ve done it again.]
A few logistical tips: come with a big group so you can sample all of the odd dishes. Other things I would have liked to try include the spicy lamb with cumin (Xinjiang style) and the pork face and cucumber salad. Oh well, perhaps next time.
Also, beware that it is a schlep from the Flushing-​Main St subway. But the walk is worth it.
The food also screams summer time food, with all the crunchy texture, chilled preparations, and fresh ingredients. Go on a warm night, and thank me later.

The relatively new Flushing restaurant M & T is a total dive that specializes in Qingdao cuisine. If my Chinese (which is limited to the back of fortune cookies and Internet research) serves me correctly, Qingdao is pronounced Tsing Tao, just like the region’s famous beer.
Even with the three Chinatowns in NYC, it is not easy to find Qingdao cuisine. It turns out the region is known more for their drinking than their eating. But you imagine the people can’t survive on beer alone. So we went to Flushing to try a very rare type of Chinese food.
After ordering three dishes, it made sense that these people like their beer because the food made me think of Chinese pub food. The only dish we ordered that was not fried was the Qingdao cold noodles, which were not what I expected from a noodle dish. The noodles were in the form of jelly — literally, jelly. The jelly was sliced thick and short and the rest of the vinegary, garlicky dish with carrots and cilantro was delicious, but I couldn’t really get past the texture of the jelly.
The fried dishes were a bit heavy but were all incredibly flavorful and much more thought out and unique than your American mozzarella stick or chicken nugget. Each batter was different and the sauces and presentations were exciting. I’ve honestly never enjoyed fried food so much.
The pork with shrimp sauce was incredible. The meat was tender and flavorful. And the addition of the (marinated?) shrimp sauce added an extra sweet, salty zing to the battered pork. It would make my top 100 easily. The eggplant dish (which we foolishly ordered in the hopes of being our healthy option) was fried just to the point of crispiness, while still holding the vegetable’s soft tenderness.
We also got the fish sticks, which are fresh pieces of a meaty white fish that are battered and fried, topped with crunchy peanuts, sesame seeds and crispy hot peppers. There was no sauce served with the dish (it was almost a dry rub of spices) and I found it just a bit dry. But I was amazed at how fresh the fish was and how light the batter ended up. The crunch of spices was a nice touch, but I wish there were more of them.
The couple that ran this restaurant were thrilled to have us and promised to make more recommendations next time. I will gladly return, just as long as they can recommend a vegetable dish to balance out all the fried food and they won’t make me do a keg stand.
–eatthisny

My favorite dish was the pig face and cucumber salad.

i popped my food ambassador cherry at this place — it was a nice friendly restaurant. i guess that’s because one of us spoke to the staff in mandarin.
but nevertheless, the food was good — some definitely missed like the jelly dish but i dont really eat jelly unless its sweet and eating it with rice is just STRANGE. its not something id order but if its there id still probably eat it.
there was fried ginseng which the group always referred to as squid. considering that we were thinking about calamari in stick form, this vegetable hits a home run in my book. there’s also pig face which was pretty good.
my favorite is still the porkchop with shrimp and the crunchified shrimp.
id recommend this place-​if you want quingdao dishes — but its slight inaccessibility proves itself to be a trudge of a trip.

It’s 9pm, and I just put my clothes in the dryer in the basement laundry room of my building. They lock up the laundry room at 10pm every night — I know, it’s stupid — and my clothes will take 45 minutes to dry. So I should be able to get my clothes out of the dryer at 9:45 before they lock it up. I also had not eat dinner yet, so off I went to hunt for dinner. It’s not the first time I’ve went out hunting for a late dinner on Sunday night. And when you live in Flushing, that’s actually kind of fun. But I only have 45 minutes, so I thought I should probably find a place where I don’t have to sit down and have a waiter take my order; I should find some place where I place my order at the cash register, get my food, and eat it somewhere. That shouldn’t be difficult in Flushing. I decided to head toward a quieter area that I don’t usually go, but that I know where fast food can be located. Indeed, there were restaurants that were still open. Americanised Chinese takeouts… no… fried chicken… maybe…
Oh hey, what’s this? A little restaurant called Qingdao Renjia. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the English name, but from the Chinese name, you can tell that it serves Shandong cuisine. Qingdao is the largest city in Shandong, and the Chinese name (loosely) means «Qingdao Families». Qingdao is also the same as the «Tsingtao» in Tsingtao Beer, by the way. I just found a Shandong restaurant in Flushing! I’ve never had Shandong food before, so even though I had to sit down and have a waiter take my order, I was going in.
The place is small, and at about 9pm on a Sunday night, it’s filled with loud Chinese people half-​drunk on beer. Every table of people had pitchers and/​or bottles of beer. That tells me I’ve come to the right place. But is it authentic? I open the menu, and I thought to myself, yes! This really is a restaurant that specialises in Shandong food!
By now it was 9:10. I needed to get back before 10 to get my clothes or else I would have to pick them up in the morning before I go to work. No matter, I was going to risk it — I know, I’m so adventurous — and eat here anyway because this restaurant was such a great discovery. I decided to get the Qingdao Style Spicy Meat. But the owner/​waiter assured me that what I really wanted was the Pork Chop with Shrimp Sauce. So, Pork Chop with Shrimp Sauce it is. He asked if I wanted some beer to wash that down with. Tempting, but maybe next time.
I was given a pot of tea which I expected to be the same Pu Er tea that most Chinese restaurants default to, because it’s the cheapest. But I think I was actually given Tie Guan Yin. I’m not an expert on tea, but the refreshing aftertaste of it tells me it’s probably Tie Guan Yin. Not that it’s an expensive tea, but it’s nice to be given something different and better than the usual Pu Er tea. About 15 minutes after I ordered, my dish came out. You can always expect fast cooking at a Chinese restaurant. The pork was fried and seasoned with the unmistakable flavour of shrimp sauce. And it was delicious. It was cut up into pieces you can pick up with your chopsticks, but big enough that you might need to take two bites to eat a piece. It had a light crispy skin, but it wasn’t too greasy like fried pork can easily be.
A dish of pork, two bowls of rice, and a whole pot of tea later, it was about 9:40 by the time I paid my bill. I made it back to my building just by the time my clothes finished drying. Next time I’ll have to bring some friends and have a pitcher of beer.

I’ve been hearing the buzz about this place for a minute now. I happen to be in flushing one afternoon after taking someone to the airport and decided to drop by to see what the fuss was about. It’s an unassuming, just-​another-​Chinese-​restaurant from appearances. But haven’t we been told since we were young children, don’t judge a book by its cover.
This place bangs out some really different, regional Chinese cuisine that’s not regularly seen. We ordered a crab and tomato soup. The soup was delicious, full of tomato flavor yet the essence of crab came through powerfully. We went with recommendations of the house and can’t even really describe the things that ended up in my tummy. Something that was tendony, crunchy, salty, saucy. It was soo good. OMG, and this deep fried shrimp, cooked with thai basil I think. So herby tasting! Very, very, very good.
I will say I was not crazy about the dumplings. WE tried the fish dumplings. It’s not dumplings in soup, or fried dumplings which I love, it was just boiled dumpling that you bury in garlic soy sauce. This is typical of Northern Chinese regions, I believe.
This place is still really authentic despite the NYtimes blow up and it’s name getting out in food blogs all over NY. Get there while the secrets still not completely out yet!

the name of this place in chinese is mei and te or beautiful and unique restaurant. the slogan is qing dao people’s home. so obviously they specialize in regional qing dao dishes. the husband and wife dining room team are really great at welcoming and attending to your needs. seems like everyone from qing dao eats here, they all know each other. although the chef is heavy handed with the salt shaker and oil, must say the food is rather tasty!
the fish in black bean sauce is great. different to have a black bean sauce that tastes spicy. the clams in special sauce is really clam soup, which is very yummy, light and sweet. fried squids with chives is really delish with all the squid parts and wood fungus. crab in ginger sauce is so good but a bit oily and skimpy on the crab guts volume. even in this age of fresh seafood global airfreight, best to stick to the old chinese rule for ordering crab and lobster: 3, 6, 9. these are the months to order them because they will be meatiest and tastiest.
the funniest thing about this place though is everyone is drinking pitchers of beer. i’ve never and i mean never seen so many lobsters dining in a restaurant. i asked the wife if they had qing dao beer and she said no. i’m like huh? isn’t this place qing dao people’s home? she says they only serve budweiser. i’m jaw dropped and say why!!! she says everyone in qingdao likes keg beer as it tastes fresher, so no one ever wants to drink qing dao from a bottle, everyone just asks for budweiser. at ten bucks a pitcher couldn’t they at least upgrade to canadian?