Dumplings not quite like Mom used to make
Local eateries’ dishes aren’t like what Mom made, but are mouth-watering nonetheless
The best savoury dumplings I’ve ever had were blessed with an ingredient that’s impossible to duplicate — maternal love.
Perhaps you are just as sentimental about doughy wrappers, filled with meat and then boiled, steamed or fried. Hopefully, you’ve tasted wontons or perogies or ravioli or momos or gyoza or khinkali that were just as good as those that I grew up with.
But even if freshly made dumplings were not part of your happy childhood, wouldn’t you want to try a restaurant that specialized in making and serving them?
I’ve made the rounds in recent weeks to three Ottawa restaurants that give dumplings pride of place in their names and on their tables. All of these places are modest and small — 30 seats at most. Outside of dumplings, their offerings are limited and you can’t get an alcoholic drink at any of them. Still, I can see myself craving dumplings in the future when I’m in their respective vicinities, and the best of these venues will make me go out of my way.
DUMPLING PARK
First, there’s Dumpling Park, the minimalist and somewhat hidden lunchtime haunt that’s frequented by many a federal public servant working on Booth Street. Tucked behind the Morning Owl Coffee House on Rochester Street, this dumpling business recently began its fourth season of warmer-weather, lunch-hour operations, slinging a bare minimum of dishes, cooking for a few customers seated at plain patio tables and for even more who take the food back to their desks.
Last week, I tried two dishes at Dumpling Park, which is to say practically its entire menu, except for the vegan options. The namesake dish here, the dumpling bowl of 10 seared pork and chive dumplings with zucchini noodles and rice ($11.50) was a nice, balanced meal, although I thought the dumplings were under-seasoned on their own and in need of soy-based sauce. I preferred the alternative to dumplings, a noodle bowl ($9.73) of fresh, squidgy rice noodles, cabbage, bok choy and red peppers, which I took with the choice of braised chicken over tofu. While some of the chicken was over-cooked, the so-called “crack” sauce, which included some black-bean funk in its mix, went a long way toward making the dish a winner.
SHANGHAI WONTON NOODLE
On Rideau Street near Dalhousie Street — a little stretch of the By Ward Market where simple Asian eateries have popped up — I’ve had several lunches at the hole-in-the-wall called Shanghai Wonton Noodle, which curiously shares its entrance with the burrito place that’s located behind it. Based on my visits, there’s apparently no shortage of young Chinese expats coming to this shop for affordable and filling fixes of massive, doughy pork wontons and Wuhan hot-and-dry noodles.
From the couple toiling singlemindedly in the tiny kitchen behind the cash, you can get 10-unit orders of big, coarsely
wrapped pork dumplings, plain or mixed with mushrooms or the slightly bitter herb called shepherd’s purse. They may be served in soup, or with peanut sauce, or pan-fried.
Generally, I’ve found the two-bite wontons here to be well-seasoned and on the fattier side, but not in a bad way, while the wrappers can be very doughy and starchy, especially when given a hard, all-encompassing pan-sear that practically mimics deep-frying. The peanut sauce has been runnier and more tame than I like, but still tasty. Broths in soups have been peppered and herbed and lightly meaty. A serving of smaller wontons, 15 to a bowl of soup, seemed like the best bargain here, ringing in at under $6, even if some of the nuggets of pork filling were small. Wuhan noodles had good sesame notes to them and a bit of heat, but the pork or well-done beef with them has appealed less.
DUMPLING? DUMPLING!
Located in a Centrepointe Drive mall, the two-month restaurant named Dumpling ? Dumpling! bluntly asks its question and answers forcefully in the affirmative with the best made and largest, most interesting variety of dumplings in this survey.
Here, a typical order consists of 15 dumplings (pork, beef, chicken, shrimp or vegetarian), boiled or steamed or, for an extra $1 above the $11.99 price, panfried. For an extra dollar, you can also mix two kinds of dumplings in an order. We’ve been consistently pleased with Dumpling ? Dumpling!’s dumplings — take that, Mr. Editor — and we’ve preferred our orders pan-fried to achieve a nice, crisp sear on one side. Regardless of the meat inside, dumplings here have contained big, clean flavours, while secondary ingredients, from funky Chinese mushrooms to more gentle asparagus to coriander to fennel to curry, have spoken clearly in their preparations. The chicken and asparagus dumplings and the pork and fennel dumplings have really worked for me, although I think any pork dumpling, if cooked spot-on, can be juicy enough to practically and appealingly resemble a soup dumpling — you do best to bite off a tip and slurp out the luscious liquid.
Steamed “crystal” dumplings were nicely textured and pretty as a picture, but I wouldn’t choose them over their meatier cousins.
Meatless hot and sour soup ($3.99) struck me as plain. A better side dish was the order of small wontons in spicy, albeit gloppy, peanut sauce ($4.99). A colleague thought it was overly gooey, but I wallowed in the big flavours, as sloppy as they were.
The clientele here often includes young families and single folks, and bubble teas and flavoured iced teas are part of the draw for some. The eatery does brisk takeout and delivery business too, and sells frozen dumplings.
For the staffers here who work diligently behind a clear, walledin divider beside the dining area, making dumplings in plain view of customers, work could be closer to drudgery than love.
But even if they aren’t cooking for their nearest and dearest, their dumplings deserve to be highly regarded.