It just might be that the jianbing is one of the most popular street sandwiches in the most populous country in the world, with a legend that goes back a few thousand years too, but it hadn’t arrived in Ridgewood until this weekend.
“It’s still almost like a niche thing, I think a lot of people still don’t know about it,” Rey Ramirez told me on Sunday, shortly after opening Cloud Tea (7-87 Seneca Ave.) inside a shuttered devotional shop on an increasingly busy corner of Seneca Avenue. Down the street, the waitroom-inspired Sieve (7-57 Seneca Ave.) had opened late last year, and a block up Sena Cafe & Co. (816 Seneca Ave.) had cracked open too, emerging suddenly out of a longtime corner smokeshop.
But what none of those spots had was the jianbing, which the New York Times reports “resembles a French crepe,” and which Ramirez and Michelle Zou—who runs the shop with him—sell for $7 a pop, which makes them both cheaper and more satisfying than most sandwiches in the area. They come out surprisingly crunchy, filled with bodega ingredients: eggs, ham, and “hot dog chicken,” the latter a choice that Zou’s sister, Rita, explains to me logically: “Beef would be too strong.”
“I ate them growing up all the time,” Rita Zou says. Both Rita and Michelle grew up in Elmhurst, where Rita still lives. Ramirez hails from a little further south, over in Corona. He hadn’t encountered jianbings there, however. Instead, he found out about the idea after moving briefly to Flushing.
“And there was, around the corner, a spot that sold these specifically,” he said. “And I really liked it. I mean, I never tried anything like that before, and then it kind of just stuck with me.”
It’s the only thing on the menu, food-wise, in Cloud Tea, a postage stamp-sized tea cafe that Ramirez and Zou opened over the weekend, a soft cloud-pastel little dream that primarily sells a variety of ornate teas, which cost around the same price as the jianbings.
These include standard Chinese teashop fare (snow jasmine, oolong, red ruby black, etc.), as well as a handful of inventions Zou has fashioned herself, with much experimenting, like a “birthday cake matcha” and “rose garden.” The birthday cake flavoring might be a symptom of gentrified modernity (“everyone was asking for that flavor”), but the rose garden is a genuine confection, styled like an island of repose amid milky foam—what the menu calls a “sea salt cheese cloud and chocolate cookie crumbles.”
“My friend lives right around here, so we just saw this spot was open,” Ramirez told me. The pair still live in Queens but, these days, they’re just around the bend in Maspeth. Ramirez first moved there to be closer to his other job, where he’s been a longtime server at the somewhat fashionable Sichuan date spot Antidote (66 S 2nd St.) first at its Williamsburg location and, later, the second location in Flatiron. Zou had worked in food service too, at tea shops around the city and the like, though these days she also commutes, taking classes at FIT when she’s not behind the counter.
It’s busy work being in your twenties with a dream of pouring tea and folding jianbings. Ramirez says he’s thinking about adding cold brew to the menu (no espresso machine, he promises!), though early customers say they like how minimal the options are so far.
“A lot of people have told us that, actually. Whenever I tell them, ‘Oh, we might add something,’ they’re like, ‘actually, we don’t think you need to add anything.’”
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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