A-Pou’s Taste Cart

I can’t complain much about the price. $ 6 for potstickers, a healthy helping of chow mein, and complimentary soup? It isn’t 5 for $ 1 dumplings but that’s a pretty great price for FiDi land. However, the potstickers were not at all crispy and half falling apart and the noodles were oily even for an oily noodle like chow mein. I remember going to the one in Astor Place some time ago and enjoying the cart there so either I just came on an off day or that one is better.

Good place for lunch. The kimchi beef dumplings are worth trying.

The star of the show here definitely is the pot stickers! They are fantastic! I’ve tried the rice dishes and while they are fine they are nothing special. Shrimp fried rice didn’t have that dried texture you’d expect from a fried rice but it was a nice in the sense that it was different and I like that they use quality shrimp (I can tell). The Biryani was okay, but i’ve had much better.
If coming here I would definitely stick to building the meal around the pot stickers or just having them on their own. The sauces they give on the side are good but the hot sauce is pretty hot, use wisely. The soy sauce has a nice added sesame flavor.

Great pot stickers especially for the price. A lunch staple for me.
Jon S.

Favorite lunch spot. Grandma’s is an awesome cart. She is across the street from the Fed Reserve, and outside of Zeytuna’s.
She has multiple locations including UWS and Astor Place. so she only works this cart minimum once a week.
The food is authentic and she is friendly to mandarin speakers. Pretty sure all the reviewers saying her pot stickers are soft and flake apart have never had a real pot sticker… why would you want them harder? I’m not buying biscotti.
She has pot stickers in beef pork chicken and veggie. Also has hot and sour soup, as well as bubble tea.
I always go for 10 pork and a small hot and sour soup. total $ 8.
I got the noodles once and I am not a fan. But the pot stickers are pretty boss so just go for them. The soup is good too, but your usual hot and sour that you would find at Chinese buffets.
Her hot sauce packets are genuine sriracha, and she gives one packet of that and one of soy sauce (hooey kind), but I love the sriracha so I ask for just two packs of that.
Cash only, and the cart is usually there 11 – 3 Monday thru Friday.

A cheap Taiwanese food cart named «Grandma’s» served up by a brown guy in his 20s. Ah I do love New York. It used to be near Fulton but now its right behind my building at Whitehall st & Water.
Taiwanese pot stickers. What’s a Taiwanese pot sticker you ask? Well its really a pretty common not-​specifically Taiwanese pot sticker better known as the «open mouth pot sticker» because its open ended on both sides. Its easy to fry and doesn’t require as much dumpling craft as Northern water boiled dumplings (since those have to be sealed perfectly).
Side anecdote: When I was ~15 in HS I tried making open mouth steamed dumplings. All the meat just fell out inside the boiling water. Remember: academic competency does not exempt pure idiocy. (Then in college I started eating peanut butter noodles. Its a game of how low can you go).
Ahem sorry. Anyways… I went for the Taiwanese pork. (cmon, Kimchi beef? Ew?) The dumplings are not too oily and easily breaks apart. It has a teensy bit of spice to it and the meat is the bland, light colored pork with no oomph. Even then, I think it meets expectations for a street cart in its price range.
For 6 dollars you can get 5 pot stickers with a side serving of vegetable lo-​mein. For 8 dollars you can double it to 10 pot stickers. Nothing to write home about, but enough to satisfy a crave.

This is becoming one of my go to places for lunch down in financial district. Excited there are good dumplings to eat. Before I found this cart, Rickshaw was the only other option which basically meant no dumplings bc rickshaw is pretty bad.
I’ve been here 5 or so times and they’ve been consistently good.
10 potstickers for $ 6 and you get a bean soup dessert! Usually they’re at Nassau and Liberty; Last saw them on Pine St btw Nassau and William St.

I got the 5 dumplings and noodles lunch special for $ 6. Very good, standard food. The noodles, mixed with veggies, were’nt too greasy. I got veggie and pork dumplings. They were okay, nothing to rave about. My meal came with sweet red beans and rice for a dessert. Delicious!
I think this is a decent spot if you you want some basic Chinese food (dumplings, noodles, soup) in the FiDi area, in comparison to the overpriced (China Chalet) and disgustng (Yip’s) options in the area.

if my grandma made dumplings, they would be tastier and not be rectangular.
but she does not…
thanks for providing two types of sauces to help spice things up.

I have gone here about a half dozen times over the past month, and have gotten the same thing each time — 10 vegetable pot stickers over noodles (reasonable $ 8). The pot stickers are quite good, but I am no expert on the subject. To me, the taste is there, and they have a nice texture and consistency. The tend to break apart rather easily, but it hasn’t affected my enjoyment yet.
The noodles are standard, but like the rest of the food, delicious. The woman in the cart said the brown sauce that accompanies your food is soy sauce, and I suppose it is, but it tasted sweeter and less salty than the kikkoman I’m used to.
If you’re watching your sodium — avoid at all costs. It’s not something I have to worry about, but I’m afraid if I keep eating here, I just might in the not so distant future. Regardless, it’s delicious, and the veggie option is quite satisfying.

Good food, great customer service… win win!
The pot stickers are delicious, the chicken is my favorite. The Basil Chicken special also is very tasty. Even though it is not listed, they will combine pot stickers and rice for a yummy meal. And… the prices are sooooo reasonable. Go. Eat. Enjoy!

I like the dumplings a lot even though I’m told I’m wrong in comparing them to native dumpling places. Delicious but $$$ for dumplings (10 bucks for 20). Nice variety of filling options.

I went here the other day and at last… they still had veggie dumplings! So delicious! I love this cart. I think I have been ODing with the hot sauce though.
Be careful, it will give you heartburn. The corn soup is also very good.

There was something missing in the chicken potstickers (recommended by the guy in the cart) and lo mein. Aw yeh, I know what it was… FLAVOR!!! The portion size was huge, well worth the $ 6 price tag but for a little taste, I would’ve even added a dollar. The soy sauce and hot sauce weren’t enough to save the dish. I was really excited about this cart but I was truly disappointed.

Tried 3 kinds of their dumplings (omitting the vegetarian). The beef kimchi was a little spicy, the chicken was fine, and the pork was fine but as some people mentioned, there was very little difference between the taste of the pork and chicken dumplings. Overall the dumplings had a little bit of burnt bottoms but this was not consistent. I wanted to like them more but they were just OK.

I love Taiwanese potstickers! They were so good, they brought me back to my trip to Taiwan. Perfectly cooked: crunchy on one side, tender on the others, with a juicy pork stuffing. The chili sauce goes perfectly with it and they aren’t skimpy with it either. Now, if they only had the potstickers with curry!
A good choice for a snack on the go. Kinda pricey at $ 3.50 for five, but we’re not in Chinatown, folks.

OK, this is cart food so I’m not going to grade it as tightly as I’d grade a highly regarded sit-​down restaurant, but there are standards, nonetheless. I was really dying for some dumpling-​type food for lunch and dropped by the cart for a mix of their pork and chicken pot stickers. Like other reviews, I found that there was not a lot of difference between the taste of the two meats, something I found disappointing. They weren’t bad, just mildly uninteresting. The sauces, though – a sweet one the consistency of soy sauce but the color of maple syrup, and a super-​thick chili sauce – were very good, but the chili sauce was clearly the better of the two. It was hot without being painful, though the heat was long-​lasting and kept me sniffling for a good 10 minutes.
Overall, the food is inexpensive and a reasonable alternative from the usual falafel and gyro carts in the same plaza. That said, I don’t know if there is a compelling reason to go here when there are so many other options in the area.

No other lunch options today. So we stop by the A-​Pou Cart.
There was no line today because of the bitty cold.
I had the Beef (Kimchi) and Chicken potstickers with the sweet soy sauce and VERY spicy chili sauce. I am still recovering from the chili sauce.
Overall, not the best dumpling I tasted for the dollar. I am still a big fan of the Tasty Dumpling in C-​Town. It cost way less than A-​Pou. $ 1.25 for 5 (Tasty Dumpling) versus $ 3.50 for 5 (A-​Pou).

Taiwanese Pot Stickers from a Food Cart.
A-Pou’s Taste has carts scattered across a few locations throughout the city. I stumbled across their cart in FiDi along Liberty & Broadway today.
You can mix and match flavors (Taiwanese = Pork, Hong Kongese = Chicken, Korean = Kimchi, Japanese = Vegetable). 5 pieces is $ 3.50, 10 pieces is $ 6, and there’s an even larger size.
I ordered a 10 piece mix of the pork and chicken. As Chi N. mentioned, it is hard to tell which exact flavor you are eating. These pot stickers («guotie») look authentic and are visually appealing, but taste-​wise they are nothing special. «They’re okay» is my best description of them. Because the cart is located in the lunchtime foodie wasteland of FiDi, I’ll give it 3-​stars. Call it the FiDi curve.
They also serve «Chinese Spaghetti», which just looks like yakisoba using lo mein noodles.
Since they were out of the «Classic Milk Tea», I ordered a small Hot & Sour Soup. Yes, I know this isn’t a Cantonese cart, but I was thirsty and didn’t want soda or water. The hot & sour soup wasn’t spicy nor sour and was on the bland side.
I wouldn’t go running back to try more of A-Pou’s pot stickers, but wouldn’t rule out going again, if I were craving some cart food and were in FiDi.

«Lunch special A please». «Yea, Give me lunch special C.» It was a bit weird and nostalgic as I listened to the people ordering in front of me. They reminded me of my hey days at fast-​food joints as my daily go-​to lunch spots. Since I’ve discovered Unilocal,I’ve ventured near and far to visit the popular and not so popular as well as the newly established local spots. Needless to say, back to Apou’s. I constantly perused the short menu as I waited on line, 5 or 10 potstickers, hmmmmm.
For lunch specials:
A) 5 pc. potstickers + Chinese spaghetti — $ 6
B) 10 pc. potstickers — $ 6
C) 10 pc. potstickers + Chinese spaghetti — $ 8
Optional: Big Drink (16 oz.) — $ 1
Their menu also includes milk teas (taro, green, etc.), Hot & Sour Soup, and Corn Chowder Soup.
Averaging 2 – 3 minutes per customer on what was a 10 – 12 person line, I finally made it to the front after a long 20something minutes. My mind was made up when I overhead they didn’t have chicken and vegetable potstickers, so I opted for Lunch special A, with 3 pork and 2 beef. I gladly nodded when the guy asked if I had wanted soy sauce and hot sauce. The freshly fried potstickers and spaghetti were slowly thrown in a styrofoam platter, sauces poured on top, and I was on my way to happy feasting.
Two-​thirds of the platter was filled with noodles, which sort of tasted and resembled the Twin Marquis cooked noodles that you normally find at many Asian supermarkets. I had no gripes with that as I love the taste of Twin Marquis noodles alone, but A-Pou’s was taken a step up, complimented with fresh parsley, scallions, julienned carrots, mushrooms, cabbage. Yum! Prepared in thin-​skinned dough, the potstickers were shallow-​fried so that the bottom is nice and crispy. The minced pork was tasty but slightly overcooked. This was extremely evident in the beef potstickers, which had tears in the dough, making the beef visible. Both beef potstickers looked like dried turds, overcooked, dry and bordering dangerously close to rubbery. But that was all fixed with the sweet soy sauce and hot chili sauce. The hot chili sauce, similar to a Sriracha but thicker in consistency, packed some good heat and was delish with the noodles and potstickers.
So why would I give this place 4 stars? Because I would like to give it the benefit of the doubt that my beef potstickers were accidentally overcooked. That was easily overlooked with the sweet soy and hot chili sauce, which for some reason, made my dish 5x better. I acknowledge their higher price for having to manually handmake every potsticker, which isn’t extremely difficult to do. But With the simplicity of this dish, I would be more inclined to come again if they put this at the $ 5 mark.