Ray’s Café and Tea House is a family run Taiwanese café that introduced siphon coffee brewing to Philadelphia and serves some great house made dumplings.  Ray’s is a small place that sells drinks and food and ground coffee and packages of tea and has table seating for about a dozen customers.  Their siphon brewing rig has multiple glass chambers that hold water and coffee grounds and as the water is heated it moves into the chamber that has the coffee grounds and brews.  Ray’s also has a machine to make ice coffee that adds room temperature water very slowly, one drip per second, to the grounds and takes 12 hours to brew a cup of coffee. 

The Dumplings:  Ray’s has a pretty extensive menu of Taiwanese food and American-Chinese dishes.  Their home made, pan-fried dumpling menu includes; pork & napa, pork & leek, vegetable, and chicken curry dumplings, leek boxes and a sampler plate.   I got an order of pork & napa dumplings and an order of the vegetable dumplings.  The dumplings are very large, which explains why the waiter looked at me funny and asked if I was sure when I asked for two orders.  A single order of dumplings would make a filling lunch.  The pork & napa dumplings were delicious, savory, well-seasoned and juicy and the wrappers were nicely pan-fried seared on the bottom.  In contrast the vegetable dumplings were bland and uninspired and I would have been disappointed if I had just ordered these dumplings.  Luckily I was stuffed after eating the order of pork and napa dumplings.

There is an interview with the owner in a 2007 issue of Gastronomica in which she laments that people do not buy enough of her dumplings.  She quoted as saying “I hope that someday I’ll sell so many that my pot will boil continuously, and my chef and kitchen helper will be able just to stand there and make dumplings to order.”  Hopefully this blog post will help her achieve that goal.  Go to Ray’s Café and buy some pork dumplings.

The Location:  Ray’s is located on the Eastern edge of Philadelphia’s Chinatown, on North 9^th street between Cherry and Race streets. 

The Philadelphia 76ers basketball team is trying to build a new arena in Chinatown, a move that is seen as threatening to the continued existence of the neighborhood.  There has been a groundswell of opposition to building the arena, but Mayor Parker just announced an agreement with the 76ers to build it.  The project now needs City Counsel approval to move forward.  There is a long history of arenas being build and displacing communities and I am hoping the Counsel rejects the plan.