Korea Town’s Mandoo Bar is known for the cooks at the front window making and cooking fresh dumplings and has been around for years now. Over that time they have expanded the menu a lot from its original focus on just dumplings to now include noodle and rice dishes.  They still have a wide selection of dumplings and their Pork and Kimchi dumplings, at least when I tired them last, are particularly good. I also really enjoy the dishes of pickles they provide with the meals.

I have not been there for a while, and when I went there recently I sadly felt like Mandoo Bar had lost a step.

I tried the Mandoo and Soba Noodle Summer Special which comes with three fried vegetable or fried pork and vegetable dumplings and my dining partner tried the boiled vegetable dumplings (these are vegan).  The boiled vegetable dumplings looked great, they have a bright green dough wrapper, but unfortunately the wrapper had a really gummy texture to it.  The fried pork and vegetable dumplings are gyoza style pork and chive (or scallion it was hard to tell) dumplings and are described as being lightly pan-fried but seemed like they were deep-fried.  These dumplings were fine, but nothing particularly special, the pork could have used some more seasoning.

My biggest complaint though is that the entire place seems to have gone sugar crazy. Mandoo Bar provides each table with a bottle of soy sauce, a squeeze bottle of vinegar and two types of hot sauce from which you can make your own dipping sauces. The soy sauce was incredibly over sweetened, as was the vinegar.  It was impossible to make a decent dipping sauce for the dumplings. Similarly the dipping sauce for the soba noodles was also really sweet, it tasted like diluted Teriyaki sauce.

Korea Town is not known for restaurants turning out great dumplings and Mandoo Bar had been a bright spot in the neighborhood, but maybe not so much anymore.