Gourmet Dumpling House – Boston, MA
The wife and I had an epiphany the other night. We often find ourselves lamenting over the lack of decent Chinese food options in our neighborhood. On this particular night, we were sitting around the living room trying to decide if we should cook dinner or treat ourselves and eat out. We were both craving Chinese food and something so obvious became so clear…why don’t we just go to Chinatown? Duh! It’s only a few stops on the T from our apartment and it offers a baffling array of culinary choices…we’d be fools not to go!
As Chinatown is only a 10 minute walk from my office, I have found myself doing at least a weekly Yelp search in order to learn more about meal-time options, usually with the goal of finding an occasional reprieve from my normal lunch-time cold-cuts hell. I had been curious about the Gourmet Dumpling House for some time now…it has received some pretty solid Yelp reviews and they have soup dumplings (xiao long bao), which I haven’t had in some time and was beginning to crave. And so on this fateful night we made our way there for dinner and we were not disappointed.
Here’s what we ate that night, presented in the order in which it was served. First up…twice cooked pork. I don’t know what it is about this dish, but I love it and I tend to order it quite frequently. This version was one of the better ones I’ve had in recent memory. It wasn’t too oily, the vegetables were especially crunchy and bright and the dish was definitely spicy (thank you…finally a restaurant in Boston that warns you when a dish will contain heat and then actually delivers).
Taiwanese style noodles and eel: I really wanted to be blown away by this dish…I love noodles, I love eel, and I love spicy things. I’m afraid that the slightly subtler flavors of this dish were just no match for the full-on flavor and heat assault of the twice cooked pork. Luckily, we wound up ordering way too much food and there was plenty of this leftover to eat for lunch the next day. With my mouth having the night to rest up, I was excited to give this dish another shot. It was much spicier than I remember and overall, much more enjoyable when it didn’t have any other strong flavors to compete with. I will admit though that the little slivers of eel were a bit tasteless.
Salt and pepper soft shell crab. This was delicious. Big chunks of soft shell crab, fried. Salty, oily, crunchy, a bit of heat from the pepper. Win.
Soup dumplings. These were also excellent. The menu advises that all dumplings take 15 minutes to cook so these were brought out to the table last. Knowing that they were going to be freshly cooked, I didn’t care how long it took to bring these out…they were well worth the wait. The broth inside the dumplings was especially flavorful.
This restaurant has a huge menu…what we ordered barely begins to scratch the surface. Looking around at some of the other tables, we saw quite a few fiery looking hot pots and soups, an interesting looking oyster/egg cake, and it seemed as though everyone had an order of xiao long bao on their table. The wife and I were both very satisfied and curious to try some of the other items on the menu. 4 stars for sure. One word of warning…the restaurant is quite small so be prepared for a bit of a wait, but don’t be discouraged like I nearly was. The wait is totally worth it, especially if you like really good and really inexpensive Chinese food. This now makes me 4 for 4 in Boston’s Chinatown. 4 restaurants visited…4 restaurants I’d revisit anytime.
