Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei

Braving the World's Shittiest Mall for Dumplings

Last weekend I took a trip to Chinatown with my friend Robert. He’d heard about a bun and dumpling place called Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei Jia Xiang Feng Wei, or “Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei” for short, and we were on a mission to try it out.

We followed Google Maps all the way to the Manhattan Bridge, then looked up to see a derelict old building where the dumpling stand should have been. Letters on the front said “East Broadway Mall.”

It was a deserted, graffiti-covered relic sitting under the bridge, and had obviously fallen into disrepair long ago.

“Maybe the dumplings are in this mall,” suggested Robert, sounding hopeful.

“Are we sure this place isn’t condemned?” I asked.

We found one door that didn’t have a “Please use other door” sign taped to it and went inside.

It smelled like urine and cigarettes, and cardboard laid strewn across the ground in the threshold like a makeshift welcome mat. Stained and broken ceiling tiles hung like dirty stalactites.

The entire mall seemed to be abandoned, except for a few shops here and there selling God knows what.

We searched the empty halls but hardly even found another living person, much less a dumpling stand.

The only sign that the mall was still operational was what appeared to be an ever-growing “wall of shame” where management printed off photos of people who had broken various rules and were not allowed back in the mall.

One of these posters in particular caught my eye.

My first thought was that I doubt the police actually agreed to this arrangement.

My second thought was wow there’s literally poop in this photo.

We continued wandering through the eerie mall until we came to a staircase which led to the basement. I was beginning to feel uneasy, but we were hungry and descended the stairs anyway, ready to face whatever horrors awaited us at the bottom.

That’s when we saw it: in the basement of the world’s most disgusting mall, a bun and dumpling stand with a line of normal-looking people.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Where had all these people come from?

It seems that the only reason anyone came into this mall, besides to defecate on the floor, was to buy steamed buns and dumplings from Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei.

A few years back I wrote Rat Report Dining: Lovable Shitholes, a think piece in which I posit that bad vibes generally correlate with good food. And it would appear that we had unwittingly stumbled upon the holy grail of awful vibes inside this godforsaken shopping center.

Robert got in line and asked me what I wanted. I glanced at the menu on the wall.

“I’ll just have whatever you’re having,” I told him.

We each got buns and dumplings, which was a ton of food (I could only eat half of it) for $10 per person! And they were good!

So how was our experience at the East Broadway Mall? Google user Matteo Casellini summed it up nicely:

I also noticed certain photos in the Google reviews which show a sign displaying the URL for the Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei website.

And to save you the fifteen minutes you’d spend typing that url into your browser, I’ve done it for you here —> https://fuzhouweizhongwei.gbiz.shop/

According to their website:

“Nestled in a truly unique location, we offer a culinary experience that is both a taste of home and a delightful adventure.”

This experience was a good reminder to always look for the good in things. No matter how rotten and shitty a situation appears, there may be some tiny redeeming quality tucked away like a delicious dumpling stand hidden deep within the bowels of a horrific shopping center.

And while the scenery wasn’t great, spending time with my friends and discovering new food in a nightmare of a mall was in fact, in the words of Fu Zhou Wei Zhong Wei, “a delightful adventure.”