Ling Long Soup Dumplings is a kiosk sized vendor in a shared space with a coffee shop and a choose your own ingredient mala hotpot place.  The space felt like an Asian version of KFC/Taco Bell combo restaurant – but with more interesting food. The Ling Long kiosk has a plexiglass enclosed food prep area, and you can watch the dumplings being hand-made in real time.    

The Dumplings:  Ling Long has an extensive menu of dumplings, although some of them were sold-out the evening I was there.   I tried the classic pork and crab xiao long bao, the Serrano ham xiao long bao and steamed pork dumplings in spicy and sour sauce.   All of the soup dumplings, which are 4 per order, arrived with their wrappers intact and were not leaking any soup. But I think part of their success in maintaining the integrity of the dumplings was that the wrappers were thicker than those typically served at restaurants in NYC.  The xiao long bao fillings were very tasty and each dumpling had a full soup spoon worth of soup.  The filling of the Serrano ham dumplings looked like pork and appeared identical to the filling of pork and crab dumplings.  But I definitely tasted ham in these dumplings, so I think there were pieces of ham mixed into the pork filling. The steamed pork dumplings in spicy and sour sauce were less successful than the soup dumplings, but only because they did not come with enough sauce.  The sauce was delicious but there was not enough of it to dunk the dumplings in.

The Location: Ling Long is located at213 West 35^th between 7^th and 8^th Avenue, on the north side of the street. The location has big neon signs that say Yanggoufu and Malatang, but has minimal signage for Ling Long, so it was a little difficult to spot the restaurant.