The Jim, South Philly

Posted on September 17, 2022 by rundlea

During the pandemic bar owners Fergie Carey and Jim McNamara, of Fergie’s Pub and The Goat, along with Tony Rim of 1225 Raw and The Foodery opened The Jim in the old JC Chinese restaurant location.  They kept the old JC logo on the exterior, the very cool old rectangular bar and the dragon murals and now serve dumpling, noodles and Korean-style Chicken wings and have a good beer list and cocktails.  The Jim’s interior space is tiny and bunkerlike but they have outdoor seating along 8th street.  The place has a good vibe and the food is excellent – great old school American-Chinese food – and the waiters are on point about available vegan options, which include several dumpling and noodle options.  The Lo Mein noodles are classic and come served in an old-style cardboard Chinese take-out box.

The Dumplings:  The waiter told us that some of the dumplings are house made and some are brought in, but they are moving to making all their dumplings in house. My guess is that the pork and veggie dumplings are house made and the mandu style, kimchi dumplings are brought in.  The pork and cabbage dumplings were juicy, savory and very tasty, you can get them steamed or deep fried.  The kimchi and veggie dumplings were also stellar, a great funky, umami, spicy kimchi flavor.  We got a steamed order and a deep-fried order, both were great but I think the steamed version was best.  The dumplings are served in cardstock to-go boxes.

The Location:  The Jim is located at 1701 S. 8th St at Morris Street in South Philly.

Posted in Chinese, Kimchi, Korean, Mandoo, Philadelphia, Pork, Potsticker, Steamed, Vegan, Vegetarian, Veggie Dumplings | Leave a comment

Vanessa’s Dumpling, NYC, Pandemic Edition

Posted on September 5, 2022 by rundlea

I have reviewed Vanessa’s previously, but while I was in NYC recently I thought I would see how they were fairing in pandemic times. Thankfully the dumplings are still great but they seem to have lost their service mojo during the pandemic.

You still order from menus laying on the counter towards the back of the restaurant and place your order with the woman behind the counter who gives you a number. Your order number is still screamed out by someone behind the counter when your order is ready and the food is still served in plastic to-go containers, on a cafeteria tray. But in the pre-times the army of older women behind the counter were a highly efficient kitchen brigade slinging out a continuous stream of dumpling orders. On this visit there seemed to be mass confusion behind the counter, they got our order wrong and orders took forever to come out, there was a lot of yelling by the staff and stress amongst the customers.

The Dumplings: I got the boiled pork and cabbage dumplings which have a red cabbage colored wrapper. They were really tasty but so over cooked the wrappers lost their integrity. I think they sat after they were boiled and further steam cooked in the closed plastic container while the staff waited on our other orders. The pan-fried veggie dumplings were as great as always, a tasty filling with a spinach colored wrapper that was char grilled on one side.

The standout for this meal though was the Spicy Vegan Dumplings. These dumplings were charred on the bottom, which creates the great flavors from the Maillard reaction, and were caked in chilly crisps and sprinkled with cilantro. The vegan beef filling had a truly meaty texture and flavor and was pretty convincing. The dumplings were spicy but not overpowering, and really tasty. Go order these dumplings.

The Location: Vanessa’s Dumplings now has five location in NYC. We hit the original location at 118A Eldridge Street, just below Broome Street, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood.

Posted in Boiled, Chinese, Gyoza, New York City, Pan Fried, Pork, Potsticker | Leave a comment

Happy Veggie Restaurant, NYC

Posted on August 25, 2022 by rundlea

Happy Veggie Restaurant is a new to me, vegan Asian fusion restaurant in NYC’s Chinatown that opened during the pandemic. There is very little written about this restaurant on the web, but evidently they use vegan meats from Lily’s Vegan Pantry (ne May Wah Grocery). The menu is mainly Chinese, with some Malaysian and Thai influences and weirdly, a Beyond Burger and fries. I need to give it another try, but I think this will become one of my go-to vegan restaurants in NYC.

The Dumplings: the menu includes Homemade Spinach Dumplings, Fried Wontons, Homemade Buns stuffed with veggies, BBQ veggies, curry potato, taro, pumpkin or peanuts and Beijing Vegetarian Momo Buns. Unfortunately the day we stopped by they were out of dumplings and buns so we tried the Beijing Vegetarian Momo Buns and the Veggie Spam Musubi with Avocado. The momo buns were not Tibetan momos at all, but were Chinese Gua bao, the white fluffy sandwich style steamed breads. The bao were stuffed with vegan duck, which had a mild smoky flavor with hints of duck, julienned cucumber and a sweet Chinese BBQ style sauce. These buns were excellent, I highly recommend them.

The vegan spam in the musubi was a decent approximation of spam, but it wasn’t grilled enough. I like my spam to be seriously grilled so it is caramelized in the teriyaki sauce. The musubi was quite large and filling and was a solid effort.

Location: Happy Veggie Restaurant is in Manhattan’s Chinatown at 76 Mott Street, just south of Canal Street.

Posted in Bao, Buns, Chinese, Momo, New York City, Vegan, Vegetarian, Veggie Dumplings | Leave a comment

Udon Lab, New York, NY

Posted on August 1, 2022 by rundlea

Udon Lab is an Udon bar and Izakaya that makes its udon from scratch and prepares each bowl fresh.  They offer 11 hot udon dishes and 6 cold udon dishes, a selection of izakaya appetizers, some donburi dishes, a handful of sushi rolls and three styles of onigiri.  My favorite appetizer was the Saba Miso-Ni, which is grilled Mackerel braised in a sweetened miso sauce and it is exceptional.  The miso sauce was sweet, fishy (in a good way) and full of umami and had a silky texture – I asked for spoon so I could finish the sauce after I ate the Mackerel.  The mentaiko onigiri was also delicious, salty pollock roe in perfectly cooked rice, wrapped in crispy seasoned seaweed.

The Dumplings: Unfortunately, while the menu describes the gyoza as being pork filled, they are actually filled with a mix of chicken and pork.  Since I don’t eat chicken I can had to pass on trying the gyoza.  Thankfully Udon Lab does really great Takoyaki, that had a crispy crunchy outer shell, a super creamy interior and big pieces of chewy octopus.  The Takoyaki were served with lots of Japanese mayo, a pile of finely shredded bonito and lots of finely shredded seasoned seaweed.  Each bite was a delicious mix of crispy and creamy textures and sweet and salty flavors. 

The Location:  Udon Lab is located in Manhattan’s Korea Town neighborhood, on the main drag of 32nd street between 5th and 6th Avenues.  It is on the north side of the street closer to 6th than 5th Avenue.

Posted in Izakaya, Japanese, Takoyaki | Leave a comment

Dumpling Jjamppong, Jeong’s Kitchen (Danny’s Kitchen), HMart Philadelphia

Posted on July 9, 2022 by rundlea

I have been obsessing over Netflix’s show “A Nation of Broth” which over three episodes, with endless food-porn, documents the centrality of soups and stews in Korean cuisine. The show made me crave some Korean soup, so I went over to the HMart food court on North Front Street, which has a ton of options for soup and stew. The food court has stalls selling varieties of kimchi Jjigaes, Jjamppong, Soondudu, and Raman, and I went with the Dumpling Jjamppong at Jeong’s Kitchen aka Danny’s Kitchen. Jjamppong is a noodle soup of spicy seafood or pork broth, usually with onion, cabbage, carrots and seafood and is commonly found in Korean-Chinese restaurants.

The Dumplings: The Dumpling Jjamppong was a huge, delicious, dish of food, with four dumplings, shrimp, squid, muscles, carrots, onion, scallions and cabbage piled over noodles, with a deeply rich, super spicy, seafood broth. The dumplings were either steamed or boiled and then added into the soup and were pretty standard, qyoza style pork dumplings, but the spicy seafood broth infused additional flavor into the dumplings, which completely elevated them. Combined with the soup, they turned out to be excellent dumplings. I also enjoyed the cabbage in the soup, the crunch added a great textural component to the dish. The broth was really rich and flavorful and for me very spicy, but the spice did not overwhelm the seafood flavor.

The Location: Jeong’s Noodles is in the food court at the HMart on North Front street in Philadelphia. Food courts in Asian supermarkets are nothing like the terrible Sbarro Pizza-Panda Express-Chipotle ridden food courts in airports and suburban malls, they often have amazing and diverse food options and are some of my favorite places to eat.

Posted in Chinese, Gyoza, Jjampppong, Korean, Mandoo, Noodles, Philadelphia | Leave a comment

Aged Japanese Soy Sauce Tasting

Posted on May 21, 2022 by rundlea

The pandemic continues to impede the Dumpling Hunter mission and outings to restaurants have been few and far between.  I have just started travelling to work conferences and after each of them there have been emails and phone calls from contract tracing teams following up on conference COVID infections.  Check this website from Columbia University for weekly projections of how the pandemic will evolve in each county in the USA.  

Thus, we remain mostly bunkered down at home and mainly venturing out for grocery shopping and, during COVID lulls, mission critical in-person work meetings.  Needing to restock on soy sauce to make dumpling sauces, we recently hit our local H-Mart and their entire aisle dedicated to soy sauces. We were dismayed though to see that a lot of the standard soy sauces had tons of chemicals listed in their ingredients.  This led us on a quest to mail order some high-end Japanese soy sauces, made from just water, soy, wheat, salt and time. We then gathered a panel to do a soy sauce tasting.  To put things in perspective we started with some super-market Kikkoman soy sauce, which was unanimously described as tasting of chemicals (but we do love their bizarre animated commercials – google it).  

Kajita Shoten – was first up for tasting, a soy sauce that had been aged for three years and had a cool dragon logo. The panel of tasters all agreed the flavor was smooth and rounded with lots of umami. Several panelists noted a Marmite-esque front-end and mushroom like back-end as the flavor evolved in the mouth.  Kajita Shoten is a Saishikomi (doubled-brewed) soy sauce which is produced from brewing equal amounts of soybeans and wheat with regular soy sauce (Koikuchi) instead of water and salt. 

This was rated as the best all purpose soy sauce

Shiso Marudai – the first of two SHISO varieties, this had as stronger, saltier front end than the Kajita.  The taste started with a fermented tofu flavor and then progressed with rolling waves of flavor, described as bright, grassy and slightly vinegar.  Shiso Marudai is made with higher quality whole soy beans which contain more oils which influence the way the fermentation process evolves.

Rated as best dumpling dipping sauce.

Shiso Koikuchi – This sauce is aged for two years and is mellower than the Marudai and has coffee and chocolate undertones and hints of Marmite.  The flavor does not evolve with a different front and back end, but rather spreads out over the mouth. The two year aging process is longer than used in commercial sauces, typically 6 months, and in comparison produces higher levels of glutamic acids which generates the umami flavor.

Yamasan Kanro Shoyu – this is another double brewed soy sauce that has been aged for 1,000 days. The sauce was thick, concentrated and salty and hit hard up-front and then smoothed out.  The taste was one consistent note across the mouth.  Described as being like an “old school Korean soy sauce”. 

This is a good every-day soy sauce.

Yamaroku Tsuru Bishio – this sauce has been aged for four years in a traditional wooden tub used for fermenting foods. It is a thicker, complex sauce with bright grassy flavors that move around the tongue and evolves.  Best summed up by a panelist as “The sauce is a ballet in my mouth”. 

Of the five, this sauce would be best for Sushi. 

After tasting this sauce, we realized the Shiso Marudai was like a young Tsuru Bishio.

         

Posted in Dipping Sauce | Leave a comment

Bing Bing Dim Sum, Philadelphia PA

Posted on March 26, 2022 by rundlea

Bing Bing Dim Sum is a hipster Chinese-fusion restaurant in South Philadelphia with a limited small plate menu that does not really rise to the title of Dim Sum. The menu includes a handful of vegan items and they are willing to veganize some of the other items. The Dan Dan Noodles was great veganized, with shiitake mushroom pieces filling in for the traditional pork, and perfect al dente springy chewy noodles. The eggplant mapo tofu was solidly tasty, but not worth the $16 they charge for it. Overall the prices at Bing Bing seemed high for what they served.

The Dumplings: The Scarlet Dumplings, which are filled with Swiss shard, tofu and crispy garlic, were way over cooked. The filling was a wad of overcooked greens with a slightly bitter cabbage flavor. However, the pork soup dumpling were among the best I have had in a long time. They were cooked perfectly, which you rarely see in the U.S., so the wrappers maintained their integrity and kept the soup contained. They packed a lot of unctuous soup into these dumplings and the pork filling was delicious, savory and slightly sweet. The dipping sauce was also really good, usually I find the traditional black vinegar based sauce to be sharp and acrid, but at Bing Bing the vinegar sauce is smoothed and mellowed. I almost, almost, forgive them for charging $10 for only four of these dumplings. I also tried the Caterpillar Bread which was essentially an open ended baked BBQ pork bun. It appears that they make a long baked loaf of fluffy Chinese style bread stuffed with BBQ pork, and then cut slices off the loaf for each serving. Instead of cut pieces of pork that fill a traditional Chinese BBQ pork bun, the Caterpillar Bread filling was a Southern U.S. style finely shredded or pulled pork, cooked in a Chinese style BBQ sauce. The bun bread and the stuffing were delicious.

The lighting at the bar at Bing Bing was not great and so my pictures did not come out well. Below are some embedded urls to pictures in the Infatuation’s article on Bing Bing.

Soup Dumplings (Infatuation)
Caterpillar Bread (Infatuation)

Location: Bing Bing Dim Sum is on E Passyunk Avenue in South Philly, on a triangular plot at the intersection of 12th street and Morris Street.

Posted in Bao, Buns, Chinese, Dim Sum, Dipping Sauce, Philadelphia, Soup Dumpling, Xiao Long Bao | Leave a comment

Bai Wei, Philadelphia

Posted on February 9, 2022 by rundlea

Bai Wei (previously Sakura Mandarin) has several things going for it during COVID times, it is spacious and airy and the tables are reasonably far apart, but the staff is lackadaisical about checking vaccination status. I have been there twice and ordered several dishes each time. The cold sesame noodles were good and reminded me of the old-school NYC sesame noodles that used to come for free if you ordered $20 or more for delivery. The pancakes stuffed with chives and egg were also very good, but the scallion pancakes were a disappointment; they seemed to have been deep fried.

The Dumplings: The dumplings were quite disappointing. The first time there, I had the steamed veggie dumplings they were really good but the second time around they were way over cooked, to the point where the green dough was washed out and had turned pale. The Pork Wontons in Chili Oil were another fail. The wontons themselves were under stuffed with measly amounts of filling and were served lukewarm. Probably because they were under cooked, the wrappers were stiff and chewy. In addition they were not even served in chili oil, but rather they were served in a mixture of soy sauce and the same sesame sauce that came with the noodles. There might have been a little chili oil mixed in, but there was no chili spice heat..

Lastly the Pan Fried Pork Soup Dumplings (Sheng Jian Bao) were weak. The pork filling tasted pretty good, but there was no soup and the bottoms of the bao were not nearly fried enough, plus the bottoms of the bao were quite oily. It is hard to do fried soup dumplings right, so that the bottom of the bao is seared dark brown and there is still liquid soup inside of the bao. In the US you can usually expect the bottom of the bao to be seared but I have rarely been served this dish with liquid soup inside the bao. I order this dish because I enjoy the contrast of the crispy texture of the fried part of the bao and soft texture of the steamed part of the bao and the umami flavor from the Maillard reaction that occurs when the bottom of the bao is seared. If there is soup inside then that is a bonus. But no searing on the bottom of the bao and no soup inside makes for a weak pan fried pork soup dumpling.

The Location: Bai Wei is on the corner of 11th street and Race street at the edge of Philadelphia’s Chinatown. But my recommendation is that you head deeper into Chinatown and try one of the many other options available there.

Posted in Bao, Buns, Chinese, Chive, Philadelphia, Pork, Sesame Sauce, Soup Dumpling, Veggie Dumplings | Leave a comment

Heading back into the kitchen

Posted on December 23, 2021 by rundlea

With the Omicron surge upon us the Dumpling Hunter team is retreating from restaurant dining for a while and returning to home cooking. We recently tried making pork and kimchi dumplings using OmniFoods plant based ground pork. I am not going to post the recipe because they did not turn out that great, but the pictures are pretty. The OmniPork worked quite well for making pork and scallion wontons, but the mild flavor of the OmniPork was totally overpowered by the kimchi. The kimchi itself was excellent, but these dumplings did not replicate the truly great flavor of pork and kimchi dumplings.

Stay safe out there.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Izakaya E.A.K., Hell’s Kitchen, NY

Posted on December 20, 2021 by rundlea

Izakaya E.A.K. is part of Japan’s E.A.K. Ramen chain of restaurants (in Japan known as the Machida Shoten chain), which specializes in IEKEI ramen. According to their website they have over 400 locations in Japan and a presence in Singapore, Taiwan, Phillipines, Italy, China, Thailand and the U.S., with three locations in New York City. IEKEI style ramen marries together the Tonkotsu style of Kyushu and the Shoyu style of Tokyo and is topped with spinach instead of green onions and uses a thick, straight noodle. Izakaya E.A.K. serves their IEKEI ramen, including three vegan ramens, and a decent selection of typical izakaya dishes.

The Dumplings: The Homemade Ginger Gyoza were grilled and then a batter was poured on top of them, so when they are done, they are cooked into a fried disk of batter. This preparation is often called “dumpling lace” or “crispy lace skirt”, and as the names imply the fried batter is usually very thin, crispy and lace like. At Izakaya E.A.K. the fried batter layer was instead thick and leathery and not particularly enjoyable. The pork gyoza filling also contained a lot ginger, so much so, that it was overkill and the dumplings had a metallic aftertaste. The dipping sauce also have a lot of raw ginger flavor which just added to the metallic flavor.

The takoyaki where artfully presented but sadly did not come adorned with bonito flakes. I actually prefer this dish presented as street food, in a paper boat style container with takoyaki sauce and Japanese mayo sauce squirted everywhere, and a big pile of bonito flakes waving in the thermal currents coming off the blazing hot takoyaki. Speaking of which the takoyaki I was served were only lukewarm. The outside was fried crispy and the inside was creamy, so I think my serving had sat for a bit before they were brought to me.

Thankfully the meal was not a complete bust, because the Butakaku (pork belly) bao were sensational. The bao were filled with a thick slab of very tender, creamy with layers of fat, pork belly that tasted amazing. The bao were doused with a ton of Japanese mayonnaise. The contrast of the savory pork and the sweetness of the bao bun and the mayonnaise created a perfect blend of sweet and savory. This is almost certainly the best pork bao I have ever eaten.

Location: Izakaya E.A.K. is on 46th St. between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, which is the theater district’s pre-show restaurant row. It is right next to sake bar Hagi 46.

Posted in Bao, Gyoza, Izakaya, Japanese, New York City, Pan Fried, Pork, Potsticker, Ramen Bar, Takoyaki | Leave a comment