In Julia Moskin's April 30, 2008 dining article in the New York Times, she recommends some of Manhattan's unsung excellent sandwiches. I was surprised and delighted to find that two of her seven picks are of Chinese concoctions. Here are a few excerpts from her article:

The Next Best Things in Sliced Bread by Julia Moskin

A great New York sandwich is large; it contains multitudes. And new contenders are turning up all the time to challenge the mighty meatball parm and the elegant B.L.T. Whether invented, imported, or refined here — whether discovered in the boroughs or farther afield — the seven sandwiches here move the dialogue forward.

NIU ROU SHAO BING

Those who consider China an unlikely source of handcrafted breads should consider the popular breakfast called you tiao shao bing: a fried cruller folded inside a fluffy sesame-sprinkled pancake, essentially a bread sandwich. In New York, shao bing (sesame pancakes) often appear at Beijing-style fried dumpling shops, known for their remarkable price-to-quality ratio and their lack of amenities, like chairs. But they also make niu rou shao bing, an exquisite sandwich on bread that rivals anything from Sullivan Street Bakery or Tom Cat Bakery.

The flat-bottomed woks used to sear the dumplings are put to work frying shao bing the size of large pizzas. Right out of the wok they are sprinkled with sesame seeds, hacked into wedges, dabbed with hoisin sauce and stuffed with braised beef. The crunchy sandwich shows off the bread’s flaky inside, subtle scallion flavor and golden crust. (The key is timing: wait for bread that is hot off the stove.)

Kai Feng Fu Dumpling House in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is one of the best of New York’s new crowd of specialists in mian shi, meaning flour food, a staple of Northern China. “It’s a way of categorizing dumplings, noodles and bread as opposed to rice, the staple of the South,” said Fuchsia Dunlop, a British journalist who graduated from culinary school in Sichuan and has written books about cooking and eating in China.

CHILI MACKEREL MANTOU

Province’s crusty, spicy, resoundingly fishy mackerel mantou is nothing a fish sandwich might expect to be. Instead, it resembles a hot dog with the works: chewy, salty and squirting juice from the heap of crunchy pickled shallots on top of the fried fillet. Holding it all together are the steamed, fluffy buns known as mantou.

“Growing up in Hong Kong, I ate everything with chopsticks in one hand and a mantou in the other,” said Pak Wong, an owner. “It made sense to put the food and the bun together.”

Characteristic of Northern China, mantou are pillowy like English muffins, soft like hamburger buns, and they soak up flavors like nothing else.

This sleek shop straddles chic TriBeCa and scrappy Chinatown, much like its sandwiches, which incorporate kimchi, braised pork belly, beef burgers and Japanese pickles. “Our sandwiches are very New York because they are not Chinese, not Korean, but all kinds of things we like,” Mr. Wong said.

You can read the full article here

Personally, I've never had a mackeral mantou sandwich, but I am definitely looking forward to trying out some of these sammies next time I'm in the Big Apple.