Long Island dining is suddenly more fun at these fusion restaurants

It was difficult to tell what cuisine they are going for at Jade Eatery & Lounge, a new restaurant tucked into a sleepy, nondescript Hicksville strip mall. But if I had to pin it down, I might say “Las Vegas.” A minuscule sign tacked out front stated, “Modern Asian fusion,” but inside, the vast room was packed with a hodgepodge of Zen imagery, including a 20-foot-tall golden Buddha that fills the space with glowing energy.

Arriving early, we snag a coveted seat by the room-length koi pond just as a server feeds the shimmering orange fish, and they follow our fingers as we stretch them out over the water. Inside the black folder on the table is a tablet with an endless array of menu categories and subcategories, a staggering selection of Chinese, Indian, Thai and budget sushi options that is difficult to navigate.

Asian fusion restaurants aren’t typically the type of establishment that food snobs flock to. But over the past few years, the genre has been undergoing a quiet renaissance. And today you’d be surprised at some of the dishes you can find.

As Jade heats up with date-night revelers and large parties of women in delicate silk hijabs, a server brings an ingenious appetizer, one I’d never seen before: a long rectangular plate of candied lotus root, bright-red and sticky, like Panda Express chicken. The crisp tubers bring back memories of Sichuan hot pot, but here they are deep-fried to starchy perfection, their sweet sauce spiked with chilies.

Jade is managed by Karan Kumar and his family, who brought in chef Sonam Sherpa from the restaurant’s sibling in Forest Hills, Queens, to execute a halal-certified menu that excels in both the food of both China and India.

Flavors from those countries also merge in the form of Indochinese food, also known across India as Hakka food. This newer style shouldn’t be confused with the cuisine of the Hakka people, originally from northern China. Instead, it was developed by Cantonese and Hakka immigrants in Calcutta during British colonial rule. It’s now a beloved secondary cuisine across South Asia and its diaspora.

In all honesty, Jade’s Hakka noodles, a simple Chinese stir-fry of bouncy chow mein noodles with julienne vegetables, taste a lot like something I’d pick up from a neighborhood Chinese takeout joint, pleasingly familiar and good. But a vegetarian take on an Indochinese favorite, Manchurian meatballs, made here with breaded cauliflower, steals the show with its intensely flavored soy-based gravy that tasted equal parts India and Hong Kong.

In this bustling nightclub of a restaurant with Bad Bunny pounding through the speakers, I wonder if it was really the stellar cooking that people were looking for here. Multiple women are taking selfies on their phones. Wasn’t this more about the scene, and perhaps, posting something fun on Instagram?

I posed this question to Jade’s social media manager, Daisy Vera, and she said that the restaurant puts a greater emphasis on food quality than viability on social media. She said it’s her role to highlight what’s currently on the menu, not to suggest dishes that might be “grammable.”

“In this day and age, I feel like a lot of restaurants focus on the ambience and the beauty of the restaurant, and their dishes don’t match that,” she said. “But if a customer comes in and says the food looks better on TikTok, we’ve lost . … I want to retain the customer rather than keep getting new customers and no one comes back.”

When you look at Jade together with a few other recently opened restaurants, it feels like the beginning of a new moment. These places will question your assumptions about culture and the way we eat, not only across the continent of Asia but right here on Long Island. Cinnabar, for instance, exhibits a high level of precision in its cooking and a menu that pushes the envelope yet is somehow natural while bridging the very different (and various) regional cuisines of China and Japan. Kitschy shrimp lollipops, shaped like bubbly red lychee fruits and filled with minced shrimp, are way better than you’d think; a delicate Japanese steamed custard, chawanmushi, called “heirloom egg” on the menu, punches you with salty ikura fish roe and embraces you in a snuggle of rich foie gras.

Perhaps the most prominent player in this space is Mito, a minichain from Forest Hills, that last year took on an elegant Art Deco look inside a former P.F. Chang’s at Smith Haven Mall. On my first visit last summer, I indulged in a bowl of scallop linguine in a miso butter cream sauce, kicking it up further with some soy sauce from the table. As part of its expansion, the growing chain changed its full name from Mito Asian Fusion to Mito Modern Japanese Cuisine + Lounge, although Korean galbi short ribs and Peking duck in scallion pancakes had a place on the sushi-dominated menu.

Late last year, Mito opened its second Island location in the behemoth Bank of Babylon space formerly occupied by Monsoon. After a long wait, a stunning dim sum tasting platter arrived with jet-black truffle Wagyu beef dumplings and meaty shumai stuffed with Iberico pork. Mito strives to present a foodie-approved take on elevated cuisine. But its rebranding hints at the fact that the “Asian fusion” descriptor might no longer be as marketable as it once was. A recent query to local diners on Facebook echoed my suspicions.

“I just feel like there’s not a respect for the individual culture and its traditions,” said retiree Christine Bridges, 73, of St. James. She describes herself as a purist and doesn’t frequent Asian fusion restaurants. “What is Asian fusion? To some extent, every cuisine adapts as it goes along. If it’s a Japanese person adapting their own traditions, I don’t have a problem with that. But when it’s a person, not even an Asian person, making up these dishes, I have a problem.”

This is a sentiment I’ve felt personally, even if I don’t want to admit it. But when I posed this question to several different friends and Facebook foodies in the AAPI community, not a single person said they were offended by the idea of grouping Asian cuisines together.

“I have very thick skin and I’m not politically correct,” said John Li, 49, a native of Shanghai and current resident of Dix Hills, whose career in finance has supported his food and travel habit. “I don’t get offended at all. And you know, to me, if people want to embrace my culture, I take that as a compliment.”

But still, Li dislikes the Asian fusion genre and would instead recommend going to Momofuku in Manhattan or an “excellent” restaurant such as O Mandarin in Hicksville, which he refers to as “Chinese fusion” because it serves dishes from all over China.

“We live in New York. Everything that we eat is a fusion in itself of different cultures,” he said. “If I hear the name ‘Asian fusion,’ I try to shy away from it because that shouldn’t be a marketing theme. Just cook the damn food and if it’s good, I’ll keep coming back. Saying it’s fusion doesn’t make sense to me.”

But, in keeping with the trends coming out of Flushing’s Chinatown, some restaurateurs keep pushing to create memorable experiences. At the new Spring Shabu-Shabu hot pot buffet in Westbury, the bustling buffet area is stacked with rows of fresh noodles (including Korean sujebi), displays of greens, Sichuan dipping sauces, an entire section of fish cakes — and green-tea soft-serve.

Then there is Jun Burns, co-owner of Red Tiger Dumpling House in Stony Brook, who spent four years building out her second restaurant, a Korean Japanese barbecue place in a Lake Grove shopping center. Wuyang Casa BBQ is decorated to look like an ancient temple and each table features a golden barbecue grill imported from China. Dim sum carts roam the deep-red room, but the highlight of the menu is a huge Ferris wheel of raw meat ($75.99) that requires two servers to haul over to your table. “We saw some other places in China using it and we thought it was a fun idea to bring it into our restaurant, too,” she said. “You think of an amusement park.”

Burns was born in Beijing and spent time in Boston before moving to the Stony Brook area. There, she opened nearby restaurants to support her two children. But Wuyang Casa was inspired by her travels across Japan and Korea. A meal can proceed in a zany fashion from neon-colored dumplings with a cumin dipping condiment found in Northern Chinese barbecue to meat selections such as beef tongue and chicken wings that are cut in half and thrown onto the grill. For dessert, prepare to toast your own s’mores. Wuyang Casa may not be a place for Korean barbecue purists, but it sure is a whole lot of fun — and a reminder that great food is just one of the unpredictable reasons to love a restaurant.

By Andi Berlin

andi.berlin@newsday.comAndiBerlin

Andi Berlin is from Arizona and does not know where she is going. But when she gets there, she’ll find something beautiful and delicious that the world needs to taste.