This weekend a group of adventurous dumpling-lovers went on a casual 14-mile bike ride around the city (the Richmond, Sunset, West Portal), trying seven kinds of dumplings from three restaurants, on a foggy but surprisingly warm day.
For variety from the usual coffeehouse start, we met up at SoW, a pop-up fresh juice bar in the Pause Wine Bar space. The “stonefruit flight” of yellow peach, saturn peach, and santa rosa (tart) plum juices was excellent:
Then we were off around the city. For some restaurants (Dumpling Kitchen and Kingdom of Dumpling) we picked up dumplings to-go, then converged on a picnic table in a nearby park to eat:
The chili wontons from Dumpling Kitchen were pretty good (though their xiao long bao were disappointing compared to Shanghai Dumpling King), and the basic pork and chive(?) dumplings with a thick chewy wrapper from Kingdom of Dumpling were also good. Kingdom of Dumpling’s chili sauce was the easy winner of the day, though.
Some more biking through the city, past strange ponds and metal-clad houses:
My favorite dumpling stop was Shanghai Dumpling King, where we sat down for gyoza and a few batches of xiao long bao and the crab-and-pork equivalent.
The soup dumplings there are just amazing– really tender and flavorful pork and spices in a pocket of rich broth.
Our attempt to visit a fourth dumpling house, Xiao Loong in West Portal, was frustrated when we showed up 20 minutes after they’d closed their lunch service. But by then we’d already consumed perhaps 120 dumplings between 9 people, so this may have been good luck in disguise…
A ride up and over hilly Portola and down steep steep Clipper and we were back in Noe for a post-ride drink at Valley Tavern. Great day, everyone, and let’s do something similar again some time!
