We attempted the lucky peach dumpling crawl this weekend and failed. Beijing pie house took so long by the time we got to luscious dumpling they were closed and emperor noodles were sold out of the pan fried pork buns. We would have to settle for a 7xbang dump crawl. We also went off script at a few places and ordered some supplements because we were concerned we would end up hungry after this. At what time does 7th lunch turn into 1st dinner? #askingforafriend
Elite
It would be criminal to dine at Elite and only order the shu mai and har gow, so we got some extras to hold us over for the 5 minute car ride to the next stop.
the LP list is more hit than miss, but personally, i would have skipped emperor noodles anyway as their SJB are a bit doughy to me, and i would have crossed the street and gotten the shui jian bao at tasty noodle.
i would have also stopped at mian one more plaza over from SDH and gotten the wontons in chili oil, that dish has something like five spice powder or star anise in it that just takes that dish to an entirely new level.
MIAN wasn’t open when I designed this, but it’s a great addition. If I re-did it now I think I’d also replace the SJB from Emperor with the ones from Kang Kang.
And I thought long and hard about adding Shanghai Dumpling’s salted egg yolk dumplings, but decided in the end it was too much with DTF and Wang Xing Ji. If you wanted to leave DTF off, that would definitely be the back up… but I thought about it from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t live here and didn’t get to eat at these places a lot (as opposed to the person who’s been to DTF a million times and wants a more off the beaten path/unique soup dumpling option.)
i do prefer the kang kang version over the emperor noodle version but the shui jian bao at tasty noodle house (the only dalian place in the SGV) has become my favorite of shui jian/sheng jian bao choices here.
whenever they get any love from a gweilo, it’s for their rectangular dumplings which are really no big deal taste-wise, but they do have some good stuff: