Craig and I have driven past this place with its neon "DUMPLINGS" sign for a while. Finally, I decided to check teh Intarwebz for information about it. I saw a bunch of reviews, virtually all of them positive. As I am a HUUUUUGE fan of all dumplings, we decided to check it out.
Side note - every ethnicity has dumplings of one sort or another. Pierogies, ravioli, what have you, I loves them all.
We started out our meal with soup. I ordered the egg drop soup and Craig chose the hot and sour soup. Which is the reverse of our usual choices, but what the hey. My soup was very light, not the usual thick bright yellow concoction I'm used to. It was excellent! Craig's was pretty much the same soup but with added rice wine vinegar, hot chili oil, and some tofu. It was an excellent and different version of the traditional hot and sour soup.
Next was our "salad" course. I ordered completely randomly - flavor green beans sheets. It was a bit weird, but it grew on me. It was tagliatelli-sized strips of a very chewy noodle-type thing with strips of cucumber, shreds of chicken, and maybe parsley dressed with a sweet rice wine vinegar dressing. The noodles were perfectly clear, similar to konjac noodles. I was a bit taken aback at first, but the flavor was so amazing that I just kept eating them. They are really, really, REALLY hard to eat with a fork, though. Chopsticks are kind of necessary.
Craig's salad course was the horseradish cucumber, which was very tasty and not too overwhelmingly horseradishy, even for weenies like me.
The dumplings. OMG the dumplings. There are twenty-five different kinds, vegetarian included. We ordered the pork and scallion dumplings and the beef and onion ones. Both were absolutely wonderful. Thin wrappers with lots of filling. There were a few choices of sauces on our table - straight soy sauce, something labeled dumpling sauce (garlic, rice wine vinegar, maybe Chinese mustard), another labeled sweet dumpling sauce (soy, sugar, rice wine vinegar), and a hot chili paste.
Our total bill came to $28.
There is nothing on the menu that is typical of what we think of as "Chinese food." No egg rolls, no fried rice, no sweet and sour pork. This is northern Chinese food, and it's absolutely wonderful. Highly, highly recommended.
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