Jianbing, a popular Chinese street snack, has lately taken New York City by storm.
Brian Goldberg, founder(创始人) of Mr Bing, and Reuben Shorser, co-founder of the Jianbing Company, both discovered jianbing while studying putonghua in Beijing. After returning to New York, they both started their own jianbing businesses.
“Jianbing is so new to New Yorkers that the demand has been much larger than we have expected,” the director of operations at Mr Bing said. The company sells hundreds of jianbing every day. Sometimes people line up over half an hour for the food. The customers are mainly office workers and college students, mostly Chinese students.
To make jianbing the same as it tastes in China, Mr Bing invited Chinese jianbing makers to train the company’s workers in New York. In China, street sellers sell the snack for less than a dollar a piece. In New York, it can go for as much as $15. American customers have so far given good opinions about the Chinese traditional snack, and have shared pictures of it across social media.
A traditional jianbing starts with batter(面糊) put onto a round cast-iron(铸铁制的) pan to become a thin piece of pancake. After different sauces and ingredients(原料) are placed onto the thin pancake, it is folded up to be eaten like a sandwich.