Little Susie’s is known for its hand-pies, which are like small pasties, single serving, sweet or savoy filled pies with a closed crust. I tried the Point Breeze location, which is walk-up to-go only, with service through a window on the side of the store. Little Susie’s launched in 2019 in the Port Richmond neighborhood, with a second location that opened in 2022 in Old City and the Point Breeze location opened in 2024. In addition to hand-pies, they sell La Colombe coffee, bagels and dog treats made out of pie crust. Little Susie’s is open 7am to 3pm, but they commonly sell out before closing time.
The Pies. The hand-pie menu is divided into sweet (Apple, Blueberry Lemon, Glazed Cherry and Pumpkin) and savory (Sausage Egg and Cheese, Pork Roll and Cheese, Cheese Steak, Chicken, Mushroom and Swiss, and Potato and Cheddar). I tried the mushroom and Swiss hand-pie, which is filled with sliced portobello mushroom, that had been cooked in butter and spices, and Pennsylvania Swiss cheese. The pie crust was studded with large grain, pretzel style salt crystals. This pie was amazing, a total savory, cheesy mushroom, umami bomb. Normally I try a variety of offerings from a spot before I write a review, but realistically when I go back to Little Susie’s I am going to get the Mushroom and Swiss pie again.
The Location: I tried the location in Point Breeze (S. Philly) which is on the corner of South Chadwick and Moore. This a pretty interesting area to walk around and is near a cluster of really good Indonesian restaurants.
After six years in the making, Seaforest Bake Shop opened in September 2025 in Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital neighborhood. The bake shop sells Korean flavored pastries, some of which use homemade traditional Korean fermented products, such as gochujang (Chili paste), doenjang (soy bean paste) and kimchi. After a career in social work, the owner spent six months between 2018 to 2019 in Korea and Japan studying bread-making and viennoiserie. In 2023, she rented a commercial kitchen to bake in and started baking for small events and pop-ups and sold custom cakes. Now in 2025 she has a fully fledged coffer and bake shop.
The Dumplings: OK, Seaforest doesn’t sell dumplings, but it does sell stuffed puff pastry hand pies, including pies filled with ricotta and kimchi, kabocha and curry, and mushroom bulgogi. The combination of ricotta and kimchi is delicious – creamy, spicy, funky and umami – and the kabocha and curry is also really good, with a decent curry kick. The had pies are vegetarian but, due to dairy used in the puff pastry, are not vegan. Seaforest also sells a gochujang, cream cheese and scallion sticky bun which is crazy good. The gochujang is mixed into the cream cheese, so there are spicy creamy ribbons of filling throughout the bun, which is a savory bun with a strong scallion flavor.
While everything I tried has been delicious, I feel that the hand pies are expensive for their size. They are quite small and I would guess the ricotta and kimchi pie had a only tablespoon of each ingredient in it.
The Location: Seaforest Bake Shop is located on the corner of 16th and Bainbridge street in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood. The shop is an easy walk from the Rittenhouse Park area.
The wealth of Asian restaurants in Vienna was initially surprising to us. But a cabbie explained that Austrian’s don’t really go out to eat Austrian food, when they eat out they are seeking different flavors and Asian food is hot right now.
Ginger and Spice
Ginger and Spice is a small family run pan-Asian restaurant in the Northern part of the central Vienna, well of the beaten tourist path (Nußdorfer Str. 30). The menu has some good vegan options, including a vegan dumpling and an excellent stir-fried vegetables and noodles dish. The amazing pork dumplings were very juicy, taking a big bite of one of these dumplings can yield an explosion of pork juice. My advice is to bite a small hole in the wrapper and suck the juice out before you bite into the dumpling. The pork dumplings came with a delicious green spicy, cilantro infused dipping sauce. The vegan dumplings, filled with mushrooms and tofu, were good but not in the same league as the pork dumplings. All of the dumplings are made in-house.
Again this restaurant is off the tourist beaten path, but there are a few other cool things in this area, including the Vegan X bakery and Mad Titan Comics, which specializes in older US comics.
Mr. Du Ramen&Bar
This was the best restaurant we went to in Vienna, and we ended up having three meals here. Mr. Du’s sells a miso broth vegan ramen that is off the charts good and has an excellent grilled BBQ eel over rice. They also make their own Shichimi tōgarashi spice blend that is amazing, it tastes like it has black pepper, salt, something citrus and maybe MSG added to the usual mixture of red chili powder, Sansho and sesame seeds. They serve their Shichimi Togarashi on the edamame starter and at first were a little hesitant to provide us with some to put in the miso ramen. But on our second and third visits they gave us a bowl of the spice powder as soon as we put in our ramen order in.
The pan-fried home made meat buns were delicious. The buns were served with bonito slivers on top of the buns, which is genius. The pork and greens dumpling filling, with the fried caramelized bottom of the wrapper and the salty dried tuna slivers was an amazing bite of food. This was so good, I have to ask why haven’t I seen this combination before? The vegan dumplings seemed like the standard Japanese restaurant, bright green wrapper veggie dumplings, nothing special.
Mr. Du’s is right near the main old city tourist area of Vienna at Biberstraße 4.
Matcha Komachi
This is a Japanese restaurant with several location in Vienna, we went to the one in the old city area of Vienna (Hoher Markt 8-9/5/2). This was a pretty standard Japanese restaurant, the type you can find in most major cities worldwide, that sells edamame, Takoyaki, dumplings, a selection of sushi rolls, and a few udon and ramen options. The veggie dumplings were deep fried and almost certainly of the frozen, food service variety. I swear I have purchased these frozen in a bag, at my local H-Mart. They were crispy and crunchy and mild and savory.
The one reason to come back to Matcha Komachi was the house made Onigiri (triangle rice balls). I had the excellent Yakiniku onigiri, which was a roast pork shoulder rice ball.
Lin’s Veggie Dumplin’
This vegan dumpling spot is in the Neubaugasse neighborhood (Neubaugasse 70), which is a cool shopping area with some good record and comic book stores. The restaurant is tiny, with maybe five tables, and you order at the register. The dumpling choices are: kimchi dumplings; coconut curry potato and vegan chicken dumplings; wild garlic dumplings; cabbage and carrot veggie dumplings; and mustard greens dumplings. They also have three kinds of bao, noodle soups and rice bowls. We got an order of kimchi dumplings, a veggie bao and the mixed serving of ten dumplings. All of the dumplings were steamed and unfortunately the mixed plate of dumplings was overcooked. The kimchi and coconut curry potato and vegan chicken dumplings were really tasty, each delivered on its promised flavor profile, and I would get them again. But the flavors of the other dumplings all blended together and were unmemorable, perhaps because the overcooking. The dumplings were served with a lot of diced vegetables and leafy green garnishes on top, which were kind of distracting. The veggie bao, filled with mushrooms and soy protein, was also quite good.
Some other eating adventures in Vienna.
this was really good pork schnitzel and potato salad at Erzherzogtum at the Naschmarkt, which is a small cafe at a really cool outdoor produce market (Naschmarkt). This cafe has an open kitchen so I actually watched the cook make the dish, starting with pounding a pork cutlet with a mallet until the pork was about 1/4 inch thick. The schnitzel was very tasty and not greasy at all.
I also went to Schnitzelwirt in Neubaugasse, which is an industrial schnitzel factory/restaurant, serving tourists. I swear they pre-make the schnitzel in the morning and throw it back into the frier right before they serve it. The schnitzel I got was very greasy and not particularly tasty. There wasn’t a line when I went for lunch, but do not be fooled by the line of people waiting to get in for dinner.
Zwölf Apostelkeller is a very cool beer cellar in the old city with brick walls and vaulted brick ceilings. It is truly a cellar that goes down underground for at least three floors of restaurant space. It has a good selection of beer, wine, and liquor and the Austrian food classics. We got the Burenwurst (pork sausage) which is the single thicker sausage below and the Debrecziner (spicy sausage) which is the thinner link sausage. Both were served with mustard and horseradish. The spicy Debrecziner was so good we came back for a second visit just to get that sausage.
Street Food Vienna has lots of kiosks that sell grilled sausage. The sausages are generally a ~12-inch long pork sausage and most kiosks sell around six varieties. The sausage is served inside a long hoagie style roll. The roll is turned into hollowed out tube by jamming it length-wise onto a long spice and then the sausage is inserted into the hoagie tube with some mustard lube. If you are in Venna I recommend you try some street sausage. In December Vienna also has lots of Christmas markets that mainly sell food. I saw several stalls selling a grilled potato patty that is served slavered in a garlic sauce. Very tasty.
Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House was the second place we hit after the No Kings march in Philadelphia. My friend used to eat here a lot but had not been back in years and so was excited to introduce me to the place. He, like all of the articles about Nan Zhou I have seen online, raved about the soups with hand drawn noodles. Unfortunately we were both disappointed by the noodles. Either the chef has so mastered the craft of pulling noodles that every noodle is exactly the same, with a perfectly round cross section, of the exact same diameter, or the noodles we were served were not hand pulled. I walked around the restaurant and all the customers I saw were eating the same noodles we were.
The Dumplings:Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House offers a lot of dumplings options, the fried or steamed coconut chicken curry dumplings sounded interesting, but I do not eat chicken. After eating a couple of plates of meat dumplings at Luscious Dumpling, I opted for the pan-fried vegetable dumplings. Often vegetable dumplings have artificial looking bright green wrappers, but these dumplings had a light pale green wrapper. It was so jarring not to see the bright green wrapper that my friend asked me if I thought there was something wrong with the dumplings. I suspect Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House just uses natural food based dyes rather than artificial dyes to color the dough. The dumplings were filled with small pieces of firm tofu, that looked like pressed 5-spice tofu, mushrooms and some greens and were good, but not great. They had a mild, savory vegetable flavor that is hard to tie to any particular vegetable. They were well pan-fried, so the wrappers were crispy, which to my mind always improves things.
The Location:Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House is in Philly’s Chinatown on Race street between 10th and 11th.
A couple of weeks ago I took part in Philadelphia’s boisterous No Kings march. My favorite chant was the, oh so Philly, call and response “F*ck Trump, Go Birds”. The march route was along the edge of Chinatown, and after completing the march we bailed on listening to the speakers and hit some dumpling restaurants in Chinatown.
Our first stop was Lucious Dumplings, which is a branch of the Michelin “Bib Gourmand” awarded Los Angeles Lucious Dumpling. Bib Gourmand is an award given by the Michelin Guide to restaurants that offer “fine cuisine at moderate prices”. The various news articles I have seen announcing the opening of the Philly Lucious Dumplings remarked on the presence of Taiwanese dumpling making robot in the kitchen that can churn out 6,000 dumplings in an hour. Even if their dumplings are robot made they were delicious. Lucious Dumpling’s space has a sleek, clean, modern design.
The Dumplings: We got the pork soup dumplings and the steamed fish dumplings with napa cabbage. The soup dumplings had a really tasty pork flavor with notes of ginger, with lots of soup inside and no leakage. But I think the main reason they had not leaked was that the dough wrapper was very robust, these were not a delicate, ethereal soup dumpling. This was a soup dumpling that got the job done but was not fine dining soup dumpling. The steamed fish and napa cabbage dumplings were also great and arguably superior to the soup dumplings. The fish was a flaky white fish with a delicate flavor that was complemented by the slight cruciferous flavor of the napa. The wrappers had a slight chewy texture but were thinner than the ones used for the soup dumplings.
The Location: Luscious Dumpling is in Philadelphia’s Chinatown on Race street at near the corner of 10th street.
Chang Chang is part of Chef Peter Chang’s restaurant empire and focuses on the flavors from Hunan, Shanghai, and Canton, with influences from the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and Peru. Peter Chang got his start working at luxury hotels in China and after winning national cooking competitions he took the foreign service cooking test and became the chef of the Embassy of China in Washington DC.
My experience at Chang Chang had some bumps. The first table we were seated at was covered, including the plates, glasses and tableware, with a very, very fine red powder. It was not immediately noticeable until it got on our hands and clothes. The staff said the dust must have been left over from some construction work done on the front door earlier that day – not reassuring. The other bump were that service had some gaps. We had to ask multiple times to get bowls of rice with our main dishes and to get some chili oil.
Although the dumplings were not among them, there were some standout dishes that I might return for. The Dry Fried Cumin Fish was amazing and moderately spicy. The dish was comprised of pieces of whitefish cut like chicken fingers, that have been fried in a spiced batter. I have been seeing Sour Cabbage Fish Soup on more and more Chinese restaurant menus in NYC and I was excited to try it for the first time. I don’t have prior experience with this dish to compare it against, but I really enjoyed the Sour Cabbage Fish Soup at Chang Chang. The fish was delicately cooked and the broth had a sour punch and a slow burn heat that built up over the course of eating it.
The Dumplings. Chang Chang’s dumplings were a disappointment. First of all they are expensive, depending on the dumpling $10 to $16 for orders of four dumplings. We went with the pan-fried option for the vegetable dumplings, which turned out to be really bland and non-descript. One of the dumplings, which you can see in the picture, had a torn wrapper and looked kind of beat up. We also got the Signature Pan-Fried Shrimp Dumplings which are served embedded in a lacey, delicate crust of fried batter. These gyoza style dumplings were large and packed with shrimp, but they also had very little flavor. I ended up eating them because I enjoyed the texture and, most importantly, as something to dip into the amazing soy chili oil dipping sauce. The shrimp dumplings and the vegetable dumplings just served as a vehicle for eating the dipping sauce, which I would return to Chang Chang to get again.
The Location: Chang Chang is at 1200 19th St NW, in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and is two blocks south of the Circle.
I will begin this review by saying that I did not enjoy my dumplings at the Upper West Side Dim Sum Sam. This location only recently opened and hopefully it is just a matter of the staff getting the initial kinks out of the system. Given its pedigree, Dim Sum Sam has every chance of improving and becoming great.
Dim Sum Sam is a NYC based fast casual, mini-chain focused on the “greatest hits” of Dim Sum and is owned by the team behind the Dim Sum Palace mini-chain. I have eaten at the Hell’s Kitchen and the Korea TownDim Sum Palace locations and really enjoyed eating at both of them. At Dim Sum Sam you order your food via a touch screen system, which is missing pictures for a lot of the food items and is really slow to use. I imagine at lunch or dinner rush long lines can form at the two ordering kiosks. The restaurant has four 4-top tables, a 2-top table and a row of eight stools at a bar looking out onto Broadway. I get the idea of the fast casual, Dim Sum concept, but the Upper West Side Dim Sum Sam is still figuring out how to execute on it.
The Dumplings: I ordered four of the wide variety of dumplings that Dim Sum Sam serves, which usually come three to an order. The pork soup dumplings were well cooked and none of the wrappers had ruptured and leaked their soup, but that is probably because the wrappers were quite robust and thick – these were not delicate Xio Long Bao. These bao had a good amount of soup in them, close to two spoonsful of the small plastic spoons they provide, but the soup had a metallic taste to it.
Just like at Dim Sum Palace the filling of the shrimp and pea shoot dumplings was delicious, but at Dim Sum Sam they had been totally overcooked. The dumpling wrappers had glued themselves to the bottom of the steamer and the wrappers pulled apart when I tried to pick them up with my chopsticks – basically I ate de-constructed shrimp and pea shoot dumplings. The steamed roast duck dumplings had the same issue, and as a bonus they did not taste great. The filling had been over-seasoned, with what tasted like 5-spice powder, such that the roast duck flavor was overpowered and lost.
The last dumpling that I tried was the pan-fired pork and leak dumplings. These dumplings tasted good, and I was enjoying them until I bit into a hard piece of pork gristle or cartilage. I stopped eating this order.
The Location: the Upper West Side of Manhattan location of Dim Sum Sam is on Broadway between 92nd and 93rd street, on the west side of the street. This location is easily accessible from the 96th street 1,2,3 train station.
I recently Googled cheap dumplings in NYC Chinatown and put together a tour of dumpling spots for a friend and I to try out. The Google search returned a bunch of listicles on best dumpling eating in Chinatown and that should have been my first clue that there was already a well-trod dumpling dining circuit in Chinatown. We hit four places in one evening and enjoyed a lot of great dumplings, but the places were crowded with tourists and young white people shooting photos for the socials. The four places we hit were unified by one other feature – they all had large old sriracha bottles filled with soy based dipping sauce on the tables.
Our first stop was King Dumpling in the corner of Hester and Allen streets. They were out of pan-fried pork buns so we got the pan-fried pork dumplings. These dumplings had a thick chewy wrapper with the bottom of the wrapper crispy pan-fried and they had lots of peppery chives mixed into the pork filling. My friend and I were both impressed that the dumplings were not greasy at all and we enjoyed the toothsome texture of the wrappers. These dumplings were really savory and were perhaps a little over salted. King Dumpling has one table and a few window counter seats, so we took our dumpling packed to-go container and ate at a table on the pedestrian/cyclist mall that divides the uptown and downtown sides of Allen Street.
Our second stop was at North Dumpling, on Essex street between Grand and Hester streets, which had the best dumplings of the night. We ordered the steamed vegetable dumplings which appeared to be filled solely with cabbage. Like King Dumpling, the wrappers were relatively thick and chewy but the cabbage inside was crunchy. The filling had a distinct peppery taste and we could not decide if it was black pepper, cumin or 5 spice, but between the fresh cruciferous flavor of the cabbage and the pepper these dumplings were delicious. Like King Dumpling, North Dumpling is tiny and there were no available seats, so we gabbed a park bench in Seward park across the street from North Dumpling.
Super Taste, on Eldridge Street between Canal and Division streets, seemed to have a largely tourist clientele. We got the Shanghai Dumplings, which, because there were several other choices on the menu labelled soup dumplings, we were a little surprised to see were also soup dumplings. The dumplings were overcooked and all of the wrappers had ruptured by the time they were served to us. You can see in the picture that the dumplings were sitting in the container, in a pool of soup. But the delicate soup was delicious, as was the pork filling of the dumplings. My friend described the soup this way – lite and nuanced, without too much salt, allowing the flavors to unfold in an orchestral way. Super Taste is larger than the previous two restaurants and we were able to gets seats and eat in.
We ended the night at Shu Jiao FuzhouCuisine on Grand street between Eldridge and Allen streets. This was the largest and most touristy of our tour stops. Here we got the steamed mini pork buns, which were packed with chunks of braised pork and chunks of mushroom. The bun itself was very light and fluffy and slightly sweet. This was a delicious order of bao. Shu Jiao Fu Zhou has lots of bench style tables that were basically communal tables with people squeezed in eating their food. My suggestion is that if you see a gap at a table, just ask your fellow diners if it is OK to squeeze in.
Pho Skyline has quickly become my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Philadelphia. It is a small casual family and friends run business that can seat around 30 people and does a robust take-out business. Pho Skyline traces its origins to a friendship that began at the Viet Huong restaurant, in the Wing Phat Plaza on 11th and Washington. Vincent Tran and Kiet Trinh, and Trinh’s mother Nhan who most recently cooked at Hello Vietnam in Northern Liberties, initially launched an online catering company, Bet Viet Phila, and then opened Pho Skyline in February 2024.
The menu offers a selection of vegan dishes, including exceptional tofu summer rolls. Some of my favorite dishes are the Banh Mi Op La (this is a deconstructed Banh Mi with three sunny-side eggs, steamed pork roll slices, house mayo and pate served with an amazing crispy baguette) and the Mi Kho Tom Thit (a dry noodle dish with broth on the side for sipping, with pork slices, ground pork and shrimp over eggs noodles, with a house dressing sauce, bean sprouts, scallions, crunchy pork rind, and crispy chives).
The Dumplings: Pho Skyline serves Hoành Thánh Chiên, aka fried pork and shrimp wontons. They make these small dumplings fresh in-house and they are juicy, savory and have big chunks of shrimp mixed in with the pork. I did not particularly care for the thick, sweet orange dipping sauce – I think it was a variation on duck sauce. But there are bottles of slightly thick, deeply flavored soy sauce on each table, and this soy sauce goes perfectly with these dumplings. After my first bite into each dumpling, I drizzled some of this soy sauce into the dumpling. This combination of fried dumplings and soy sauce was very good.
Pho Skyline also sells the Vietnamese pyramid shaped rice flower dumpling. This style of dumpling has ground pork, usually with wood ear mushroom and a quail egg, embedded in a pyramid of gelatinous rice flower. The rice flower pyramid is wrapped in banana leaves, which impart a tea-like flavor to the rice flour when the dumpling is steamed cooked. I have tried this style of dumpling a couple of times and unfortunately I am not a fan.
The Location: Pho Skyline is in Philadelphia’s Italian Market on Christian street, just west of 9th street.
After being underwhelmed by dancerobot we decided to finish a Saturday night out at the Korean-American gastropub SouthGate. As a fusion restaurant the menu has several American dishes remixed with Korean flavors – French fries with a kimchi vinaigrette, French fries with a puree of garlic and scallion and gochugaro aioli (SouthGate fries), a Seoul Nashville style hot-chicken, and Korean tacos. The SouthGate fries were a disappointment, tossing the fries in pureed garlic and scallion and an aioli just made the fries limp and soggy. But the menu also has some Korean classics, like mandoo, sotteok, ssam, dolsot bibimbap and a range of soju. The restaurant has a long bar, tables along the wall opposite the bar and some outdoor seating.
The Dumplings and Buns: Southgate has pork mandoo and vegetable mandoo which can be served either steamed or fried. I suspect that these dumplings were the frozen mass-produced variety, but even if I am correct here, I enjoyed the fried order of pork dumplings I got at SouthGate more than I enjoyed the house made dumplings at dancerobot. Southgate also serves stuffed bao pockets with a choice of bulgogi beef, spicey pork, shitake mushrooms or tofu filling. The bao also come adorned with pickles and sesame aioli. The tofu bao was really good – the tofu was lightly fried on the outside and soft on the inside and I really enjoyed the sesame aioli and the acidity of the pickles. I would go back to SouthGate for more tofu bao.
The Location: SouthGate is on the corner of 18th and Lombard streets in Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital neighborhood.
The search for the world's best dumplings 