Steaming is the most underappreciated of cooking methods. Roasting, frying, sautéeing, and braising are all easy to love and promise flashy payoffs like crisp surfaces and fork-tender meat. Steaming gets held responsible for grayish broccoli and impossible, bland diets, but the method is also the secret to cloud-like steamed buns and wonderfully elastic rice noodle rolls. Two new downtown restaurants specialize in steaming. Both are bao specialists (those fluffy, white mantao-wrapped buns stuffed with all manner of good things), but the similarities stop there. Chinatown's Golden Steamer offers its buns, dim sum, and rice noodle rolls in a bustling, no-frills take-out space, while the Lower East Side's Baohaus stuffs its Taiwanese-style gua bao with meat from Niman Ranch, catering to a more... More >>>