Oh, my lil’ chickadees, how I love the man’s expression in the middle: one part mockery, one part affection, one part piss drunk.

Ho, boy, I brought the ruckus to Forbes Traveler yet again. This time I penned a piece on America’s deluxe distilleries. Drink it up, chicken butts, drink it up.

For serious. I have no idea what’s happening. But he has money in his man-package. And he’s likely bamboozled beyond belief.

Worst. Facial Expression. Ever.

Because sometimes life is awesome, I got to interview the owner of a dumpling factory a few weeks ago. I ate dumplings off the conveyor belt! Yes, it was some super-awesome. Here’s my piece from yesterday’s New York Daily News.

‘We want to make the dumpling as American as the hot dog’

One hundred years ago, Bushwick, Brooklyn, was chocka-block with German immigrants and beer concocted by breweries like the stately brick Edward B. Hittleman.

Though the brewers have vanished, Hittleman’s bygone building remains - retrofitted to manufacture a different immigrant-imported delicacy.

“We can make 11,000 dumplings an hour,” says Terry Tang, 52, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a pinstripe shirt, blue blazer, gray slacks - and black bags beneath his eyes, befitting several decades of ceaseless labor.

“I work at least six days a week, sometimes seven,” says Tang, who lives in Flushing, Queens, with his wife of 23 years, Anna, and his 90-year-old mom.

Since emigrating from Hong Kong in 1977, Tang’s industriousness has propelled him from part-time noodle-maker to co-founder and CEO of TMI Food Corp., headquartered in Hittleman’s transformed brewery.

TMI creates Twin Marquis-brand noodles and wonton wrappers, spring rolls, Chef One pot stickers - including all-natural and kosher versions - and even imports bubble tea.

“I’m not a food scientist, but I do like eating,” says Tang. “My father was a very good cook.”

He calls his dad’s stir-fried fatty pork belly “one of the best meals I ever ate.”

Tang left China during the Cultural Revolution when suffocating constraints forced students and intellectuals to flee.

He relocated to England for several years, before moving to New York City in an equally tumultuous time: blackout-riddled 1977. His first home was an itty-bitty West Village apartment, surrounded by strange creatures.

“There were lots of hippies,” Tang recalls. He enrolled in St. John’s University, laboring at a noodle factory to pay rent. The hard work paid off when he nabbed an accounting degree - and a job at big-shot firm Coopers & Lybrand, which later merged with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Though his head now spun with numbers, his mind still revolved around food. After toiling as an accountant for three years, Tang’s father - then living

in the city, along with Tang’s brother Joseph - pulled him aside one day.

“Do you want to open a restaurant?” he asked.

Tang thought for a minute. “Yes,” he answered with hardly any hesitation.

Tang’s Kitchen came to Lindenhurst, L.I., followed by a second location in Islip. “Every day, it was a long commute and even longer hours,” Tang says. It was time to diversify, branch out and fill what Tang perceived to be a void in the lo mein and noodle market.

“I knew I could do better,” he says. Tang and Joseph devised a business plan for the Twin Marquis (so-called after Joseph’s twin sons) noodle factory and found a teensy Canal St. plant.

Before launching in 1989, and to ensure Twin Marquis products were top-shelf, Tang headed overseas to survey and work in Asian noodle factories.

“That’s how I learned to cook and make the best noodles,” he recalls proudly.

Perhaps he should also thank his covert espionage. “I also requested samples of noodles and wrappers from my competitors,” he says, laughing.

Research paid dividends, as his noodles became a hit in East Coast Chinatown grocery stores. “We were even in Chicago,” Tang says. “Who could expect that from a little four-person factory?”

The company expanded to Bushwick in 1992. His customers clamored for more. “Every time we’d make a delivery, people would ask, ‘Do you have anything else?’” Tang says.

He did. In 1999, Tang and Joseph started Chef One dumplings in another Bushwick space, creating flavors like chicken teriyaki and spicy chicken. Another hit.

Demand increased as Tang sold to cruise ships and casinos like Foxwoods. What could come next? A Chinese counterpart to Nathan’s annual hot dog-eating event.

In 2004, Tang launched a competitive dumpling-chomping contest. The record is nothing to shake a set of chopsticks at: For men, it’s 60 in two minutes; for women, 43.

“I can probably only do 17 or 18,” Tang admits.

Instead of honing his competitiveeating skills, Tang is focusing on community service and do-gooding. He’s active within the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, co-sponsors Queens’ annual Dragon Boat Festival and even aids aspiring culinary all-stars.

“It’s very important for us to give back,” Tang says of his $2,000 “Smart Dumpling” and “Using Your Noodle” scholarships for students at New York City College of Technology.

“Terry and Joseph are extraordinary human beings,” says Steve Soiffer, special assistant to the president at the college. “It’s very clear that they will never turn their backs on the community. Terry is eager to open his checkbook and put it where his heart is.”

Lately, he’s had to open his checkbook a little wider.

Expanding into the former brewery in 2007 brought new expenses, compounded by the recent escalation of prices for commodities such as eggs and wheat. Nonetheless, Tang remains optimistically committed to his long-term goal.

“We want,” Tang says, clasping his hands together, “to make the dumpling as American as the hot dog.”

Who isn’t looking for a bigger, better noodle?
At a tender, hairless age, I learned an important food lesson:

“Ramen,” my father said in our Ohio kitchen, teeth-tearing open a rectangular wrapper packed with noodles and “oriental” flavor, “can be delicious. You just have to doctor it up.”

To the salty broth and squiggly noodles he added sesame oil, scallions, garlic, onions and mushrooms, then he swirled in a raw egg. It was Far East ambrosia, a soup as hearty and exotic as it was economical. I slurped my bowl clean and then begged for seconds like a dog whining for another fatty scrap.

With a glee 1960s kids reserved for green-bean casserole, I awaited my father’s beguiling, ever-mutating ramen blends containing piquant preserved vegetables, bright-green bok choy, shiitake ’shrooms or even zested ginger. Packaged ramen was Dad’s blank canvas, filled with wild culinary brushstrokes.

So imagine my shock one dark, hungry night in my college dorm when, water roiling in my hot pot and pork-flavored ramen in hand, I was walloped with these words:

“I can’t believe you would eat that,” said my then-girlfriend, a militant vegan who fashioned her blonde hair into mini horns. “You’re so trashy.”

Trashy? Sure, I occasionally urinated into Gatorade bottles and drank malt liquors like bitter, ginseng-infused Phat Boy, but such idiocy was age 19 in a nutshell. That eve, I recall, the ramen’s MSG was no balm for my wounded pride. Naturally, that relationship’s longevity barely matched a fruit fly’s lifespan, but my packaged-noodle adoration has endured. Now it’s being rewarded, as ramen shops pop up in the East Village like pimples on a teen. The ’hood’s ditching its punk rock past for a pork-broth future.

Like a good little fatty, I’ve hit hallway-size Rai Rai Ken (214 E. 10th St. betw. First & Second Aves., 212-477-7030) and overloaded on simple miso ramen ($7.40). It’s pleasantly porcine, with tender noodles and a sprinkling of crispy garlic. I bought into the hype and bit into Momofuku ramen ($14) at “it” cook David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar (171 First Ave. at 10th St., 212-777-7773). My thoughts? Meh. Berkshire pork slices were soft as an overripe banana and fresh snow peas a pleasure, but my belly despised the gummy noodles. For $14, those freakin’ noodles better rock my socks off.

The best chance to lose my hosiery came with March’s arrival of Hakata Ippudo (65 Fourth Ave. betw. 9th & 10th Sts., 212-388-0088). It’s a Land of the Rising Sun ramen chain famous for its milky, filthy rich broth made from long-boiled swine bones. This Ippudo, America’s first, brought bushels of Japanese media, Tokyo expats and gotta-have-it-first gourmands—instantaneously, dinner waits stretched to two hours. Screw that. To beat crowds, I donned pants and headed to Ippudo for an early weekday lunch.

“Kunichiwa,” the grinning hostess greeted. She stood beside a wall display of colorful ramen bowls, then she escorted me to the modern dining room. It’s a white-and-wood riot of communal tables, square booths, one-armed chairs, mirrors and untranslated Japanese characters. Stylish? Insidious? I’ve long been wary of Japanese script since unknowingly wearing a Japanese T-shirt that translated to “I’m a stupid American.”

I arranged my gringo bum at a wooden counter, where I endured a particularly well-mannered version of hell: Cooks, servers, hostesses—even bus boys, dagnabit—lobbed kunichiwa my way like auditory grenades. I wished I were deaf. Dumb? That’d be my neighboring, map-toting Japanese tourists. Why crisscross the globe to chomp home cooking? It’s not like I head overseas and get a hard-on for a Big Mac. Here at Ippudo, I came for spicy karaka-men ($12). It arrived in steaming tureen as big as a loaf of sourdough bread, along with a long ladle larger than my mouth. Was orthodontic torture a hot, new Japanese kink?

No, this utensil provided pleasure. When I spooned up the silky, tanned-leather liquid, I knew why the tourists desired this ramen so deeply: It was the essence of pig, a milky broth so animalistic that one whiff could cause a Jew to break kosher, while the house-made noodles were al dente enough for a toothless grandma to happily gum.

I joined the clean-bowl club in minutes, lost in a grinning, groaning, stomach-growing reverie that forced me to unbutton my pants in public yet again.

Nothing like gettin’ pass-out drunk on your own personal bottle of apple cider. Oh, the low-alcohol shame.

I slurp and burp my way through cheapskate heaven, high on buns and dumpling

Forget Manhattan’s Chinatown: Its Flushing counterpart is cheapskate-grub paradise, packed with pork-and-chive dumplings, ma po tofu, hand-pulled noodle soups—and nary a tourist searching for knockoff Louis Vuitton.

Armed with $10 on a balmy afternoon, I bike to Flushing’s bustling thoroughfare, Main Street, and park beside Corner 28 (40-28 Main St. at 40th Road, 718-886-6628). It’s a tiny takeout counter where a gloved woman gleefully rips flesh from a Peking-duck carcass.

She chucks duck chards into a rice wrapper, then adds garlic chives and hoisin sauce. The ersatz duck taco is moist and crisp, sweetened by the hoisin and the 75-cent price tag.

Emboldened, I shuffle past tchotchke vendors and, beneath an LIRR station, discover AA Plaza (40-40 Main St. at 40th Road). Behind a row of smudged windows, a man griddle-cooks $1 scallion pancakes as seriously as a scientist. I order a hot beaut: It’s vellum-thin, the onion’s crunch contrasting the warm dough.

My belly anchored by carbohydrates and grease, I enter multifloor Sunflower Delight (40-46 Main St. at 40th Road, 718-359-6655), which offers 10 percent off roasted meats, tureens of congee and 99-cent “sticky rice chicken.”

“Sticky,” I tell a waif-like woman, who passes me a leaf-wrapped square of rice that’s like sweetened Elmer’s Glue. But like buried treasure, its center contains soft chicken—veiny meat, rubbery skin and inedible cartilage included.

“Chewy,” I say, as my nose leads me around the corner to a cacophonous dumpling stall (41st Ave. between Main St. and College Pt. Blvd.) located across from Starbucks. There’s no English name for the red-awning shack, but a sorta translated menu lists vegetable-pork buns for a paltry 60 cents. The bun’s as big as my fist, and jammed with pink pork, green onion and zingy greens: a trio as addictive as cigarettes.

Know what I’ll never be addicted to? The 99-cent Prunella tea I discover inside Hing Long Supermarket (41-22 Main St. at 41st Road, 718-961-6128), a grocery selling live bullfrogs and mushrooms alike. The herb Prunella treats bleeding ulcers and excessive menstruation. It also tastes like Band-Aids mixed with dirt.

I ditch it and descend to Golden Shopping Mall’s underground food court. I snake past gurgling pots and soup-slurpers and find Dumpling and Noodle House (41-28 Main St. at 41st Road, downstairs, 718-930-6000).

“Hellloooooooo,” says a diminutive lady, resting her arms on a flour-smudged counter.

“Hellloooooooo,” I respond. “Big buns.”

“No big buns,” she says. “Small buns.” She passes me four steamed pork buns ($1), which I coat with chili oil. They’re a juicy, incendiary porcine pleasure.

By contrast, the four-for-a-dollar dumplings tonged from the steam table at closet-size Super Snack (41-28 Main St., on 41st Road, 718-886-2294) are cold and gummy. They’re like meaty Bubble Yum. Trashing them, I investigate Golden Mall’s main entrance.

Past a shoe-repair shop wallpapered with German-shepherd posters, there’s a glassed-in counter (no English name, 41-28 Main St. at 41st Road, main entrance) filled with circular sesame-seed bread ($1). It’s flaky and dense, fatty and desert dry. I’m no fan. Someone is.

“Where’d you get that?” asks a frizzy-haired lady.

I point, and she dashes away like an excited dachshund.

I stumble off like a bloodhound, sniffing out smoky meat at the Tian Shan Shish-Kebob cart (corner of Main St. and Maple Ave.). Charcoal-sizzled skewers—cooked by a mask-wearing woman—of corn, chicken or lamb are $1. I order lamb.

“Spicy?” the woman asks.

I nod. She coats my browned meat with red flecks, scissors off the stabby end and I chomp the lamb like a lollipop. The flesh is gamy and slightly gristly, but miles better than Midtown street meat.

By now, I’ve OD’d on flesh. I need a sweet end. I need Fay Da Bakery (41-60 Main St. at Sanford Ave., 718-886-4568). The squeaky-clean bakery offers inexpensive weirdoes such as corn buns, taro-puree puffs and “green tea sticky balls,” but I’m gaga for sweet, pillowy bread topped with coconut. It’s sliced down the middle and filled with thick ribbons of bone-white cream (80 cents).

I bite greedily and cloud-like cream oozes around my lips, making me appear like a scandalous porn star. I consider napkining off the wayward cream, but I paid good money for this sugary bliss. I lick my lips, then my fingers, trying not to waste a single delicious cent.

In case y’all can’t tell, I’m as opinionated as all get-out. I provide my opinions on eateries across this fine ci-tay. Today, one of my restaurant reviews pops up here. Or below. Huzzah! Read it and eat. Ha! I’m so funny. So. Funny.

Superb French fare transcends a glossy lounge setting in Greenwich Village

Bar Blanc might suffer from multiple-personality disorder. Is it a lounge? Is it a restaurant? Is it a gimmick? Perhaps. Blanc is one of several haute eateries, from Bar Boulud to Bar Stuzzichini, hiding behind bottles of beer, wine and booze.

The thinking’s simple: Call yourself a bar, and the bar for food is set limbo low. How hard is it to trump chicken-wing expectations? But Bar Blanc’s pedigree demands more than finger-lickin’ success. Bouley vets Kiwon Standen, Didier Palange and chef César Ramirez bring fussy French style to this slender West Village hideaway that’s rustically mod and modern—and white as an Englishman’s chest after a long, cold winter.

A luxe marble-topped bar contrasts “Saturday Night Fever”–style white-leather banquettes and circular silver lights, while undulating albino-brick walls dominate both dining rooms. They’re populated by high-heels and high-rollers fingering iPhones and blabbing over clubby beats.

Euros and businessmen, welcome to your newest hangout.

Bar Blanc, blissfully, doesn’t go whole-hog with haughtiness. Though Internet chatter has chided waiters for inexperience and inattentiveness, service quirks are now ironed out. Waiters are attentive without being irritating (or forcibly up-selling bottled water), and bread-basket boys mill around, freely distributing tangy slices of olive bread.

Gratis treats are the rule, not the exception. Expect a petite puff-pastry amuse bouche crammed with goat cheese, which makes a marvelous precursor to the old-fashioned cocktail: a burly blast of bourbon and bitters, smoothed out by juice from bobbing oranges. It’s a serious intoxicator, and seriously worth $12.

Conversely, the apps ain’t a bargain. Boston lettuce, hearts of palm and a poached egg costs $12, and you’ll spend $18 for tuna sashimi with mushrooms, crispy burdock root, black truffle dressing and painterly swipes of intensely salty miso mixed with squid ink. Ingredient overkill? Perhaps, but a finer palate-provoker is the fried sweetbreads. They mingle with a rabbit terrine, greens and sheep’s milk ricotta in a crunchy-creamy tango that gives glands a glamorous spin.

Ramirez’s mash-ups extend to the flirting-with-$30 entrees, which are too diminutive to merit such a mark-up. Ginger amps up steamed snapper, tempered by a tofu puree and a shiso sauce clearer than tap water. Flaky cod wears a briny coat of saffron-mussel sauce.

The chef heads to the barnyard for the other current creature du jour: Twee “milk-fed porcelet” is served as fatty belly, loins ringed by lollipop-crunchy skin (which overwhelms the too-delicate cinnamon, star anise and orange sauce) and terrine. “It’s all the leftover bits from the pig’s head,” the waiter offers helpfully. It’s fried brown beyond all recognition, and is as innocuously delicious as any oil-singed morsel.

Carb-cravers can opt for a trio of pastas, including lasagna with braised lamb shoulder and fettuccini pasta with sinus-clearing, mustard-braised rabbit. Turned off by that wascally wabbit? Stick to the sturdy, charcoal-grilled strip steak. It’s juicy decadence with a dose of bone-marrow sauce.

That should red-line your richness meter. But should you crave a sweet finish, choose wisely: The Meyer lemon soufflé is middling, while the warm almond cake’s about as special as Paris Hilton. The home run is the bittersweet chocolate cake with a brittle candy cap, sided with salted caramel ice cream. Spoon up a dab of both and it’s sweet dreams, appetite.

You could follow dessert with an aperitif or two, but it’s best to get liquored-up in another saloon or lounge, not such a superbly executed restaurant.

The sad thing is, in New York City you could probably charge $20 a night to nap here. But seriously: Is he experiencing rigor mortis? How is he able to stay upright? Thoughts?