IF YOU’RE in New York and want to have some fun, take your friends to Malaysiaborn Simpson Wong’s restaurant in Cornelia Street and watch them taste the duck-fat ice cream in a dessert called duck a la plum.

First they stop talking. Then they stop moving. Their eyes shut, and just when you’re wondering how long this will last, their eyes pop open again, bright with the pleasure of discovery.

It’s been a long time since Asian fusion cooking has promised thrills of this sort.

These days, it’s more likely to make eyes roll. Witness the lengths that some Manhattan restaurants operating in the Asian-fusion or pan-Asian idiom go to avoid those terms.

At Wong, the euphemism of choice is “Asian locavore”. Whatever it’s called, diners sure enjoy what’s served up.

Duck tongues, anyone? Say yes, please, because Chef Wong braises them to tenderness, then rolls them into small meatballs with a crunchy fried crust.

Are you a fan of sea cucumbers, too? You’ll find slippery, crunchy bits of them in Wong’s slightly demented bolognese. Made with pork and shiitakes, and served with fat, springy rice noodles, it’s the kind of dish that tastes simply odd at first, but keeps luring you back for another bite. The flavours build as you eat until there’s nothing left.

The rice noodles appear on the menu beside the restaurant’s logo, a sign that it’s a speciality of the house. In general, dishes bearing that mark are roughly twice as delicious as the others, most of which aren’t half bad to begin with.

Wong’s lobster egg foo yong is half a lobster tail and a claw, poached to an angry red and cradled in a cast-iron skillet with a tomato-chilli sauce, a dusting of dried shrimp, two fried chicken eggs with liquid yolks and shaved hard yolks from saltcured duck eggs.

The dish comes with a slice of toast. Use it to clean your skillet.

New Yorkers will remember Chef Wong, the chef and proprietor, despite his keeping a low profile of late. A previous restaurant of his, Jefferson, was once an address known by car-service drivers and executive assistants, especially around 2004, when its sleek minimalist dining room popped up on Sex And The City.

The following year, Chef Wong had a heart attack and closed the restaurant. He tried to restart it as Jefferson Grill, with smaller plates and a lower cholesterol count, but its best days were in the past. It was shut in 2006.

Chef Wong retrenched to his first restaurant, Cafe Asean (after 15 years, it is still in West 10th Street, still cheap, still pan- Asian and still over-performing). And he travelled. He flew home to Malaysia and rounded up his mother (who is nearly 80 and gets around in a wheelchair). Together, they went on a series of eating tours across Asia.

In Hong Kong, they ate spicy crabs that became a model for the typhoon lobster at Wong. They bought shrimp fritters on the street in Ho Chi Minh City; in Hanoi, they went to Cha Ca La Vong to taste the house speciality, turmeric-scented fish fried with dill stalks, tossed over rice vermicelli and doused with nuoc cham. In Cornelia Street, the dish is renamed cha ca la Wong.

At 48, Chef Wong has closed a popular and acclaimed restaurant. He knows what a heart attack feels like. For future reference, if those things happen to you, there are worse ways to react than to invent duck-tongue meatballs.

Visit Wong at 7 Cornelia Street (tel: 1-212-989-3399; wongnewyork.com). Prices range from US$9 (S$11.30) for an appetiser to US$26 for mains. Reservations accepted.

HELPDESK
Fusion cooking: 融合性烹饪法 róng hé xìng pēng rèn fǎ
Euphemism: 委婉说法 wěi wǎn shuō fǎ
Cast-iron skillet: 铸铁制的熔锅 zhù tiě zhì de róng guō
Spicy crabs: 辣椒螃蟹 là jiāo páng xiè