My go-to order at any Chinese restaurant is pan-fried pork dumplings. While these are a consistent favourite of mine, I’ve come to accept that depending on where I eat, there are two distinct types of pan-fried pork dumplings.
The first, of course, is the $15 for 15-piece special, where you can see aunties out the back in the kitchen stuffing and wrapping each one perfectly in half a second. These juicy parcels arrive piled up on top of each other on a plastic plate and it’s usually a ‘serve-yourself’ situation with sauce – blending the soy, vinegar and chilli that are parked onto the table in their sticky-lidded bottles next to the one-ply tissue box. The fluorescents beat down to expose any mystery you’d seek from date night at a restaurant with a ‘cool vibe’ and a dimmer switch. But boy, are those dumplings good!
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good restaurant chosen purely on vibes. The ambience of the venue often contributes equally, if not more than the actual food itself, to a memorable dining experience. This is where the second type of pan-fried pork dumplings comes in.
Served on anything but a regular plain white plate, three (or another small number that conveniently never divides equally amongst your party size) allegedly bespoke dumplings arrive, paired with a soy-based dressing that has been expertly poured around the border like a moat. A fine sprinkling of diced spring onions, chives and dried shallots adds texture and freshness to this classic dish. All that extra fanfare is of course quite tasty, but the dumplings themselves usually aren’t much to write home about. It’s all smoke and mirrors to distract from the fact that these arrived mass-produced and frozen at the back door of the restaurant.
Because people don’t come to these sorts of restaurants for amazing dumplings, they come for the vibes.
