Welcome to BB’s first foodie field trip. Our tour guides are Tom Mylan, whole animal butcher for the Marlow and Sons empire and Meat Sensei at The Brooklyn Kitchen, and BB senior editor Annaliese Griffin, aka the “A-Train” on Grocery Guy, where the two write about cutlery, cookbooks, recipes, and NYC food idiosyncrasies like “Bulletproof Chinese” — something they do not encounter on this tour. Their destination is Sunset Park’s auspicious 8th Ave. — Google mapped here — home of frogs, blue foot chickens, and the best Bahn Mi in the city.

Calling the section of 8th Ave. off the N train “Chinatown” is like calling The Wire “a TV show” or foie gras “food.” It doesn’t do it justice. Yes, you can get great dumplings and buy glazed tripe and chicken feet from street food vendors. There are the usual bins of tiny dried fish and tanks full of live frogs. Fried pig’s head? They have you covered. But what sets the Brooklyn Chinatown apart (and the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, but this isn’t called Queens Based, now is it?) from its Manhattan counterpart is the stuff that is not the missionary position Ten Ren bubble tea and Custard King.

When you exit the tree-ringed, falling-down station and reach the street, there is not just one of the best Chinese groceries in the city, Hong Kong Supermarket (where you can find blue foot chickens, whole fresh ducklings, cleavers and cookware), but also a Turkish market with Lebanese olive oil and Durians, across from a cobbler on the street fixing shoes.

I’m often pitched into a swoon at the sight of exotic cooking implements and ugly, live, aquatic animals, and luckily the A-train knows this. She steered me away from the 3-gallon hammered woks and into Lan Zhou, a Blade Runner-esque, hand-pulled noodle place where we ordered the best bowl of noodles I have ever eaten.

The crispy, bone-in duck was so good it made me want to slap not only my mama but your mama. The small, cramped tables were well stocked with all the condiment-hobby-kit I could hope for and the people behind the counter actually seemed happy to serve us their food, which they obviously knew was among the best in the city. I wanted to move in with these people and spend all day in the back weaving noodle dough like a human starch loom.

Tom’s brush with indentured noodle servitude continues here>>