You know an 'ethnic' (for lack of better words**) restaurant is good when you peek in the windows and see that there are lots of people of the matching ethnicity enjoying the food. Well that litmus test was broken on Monday at 2:30 p.m. because the place was EMPTY - fortunately I looked it up on my yelp app and saw that it got glowing reviews from my fellow yellows. I was also relieved to see on yelp that they are kid friendly and accept credit cards.
The six pork and chive dumplings were bursting with fresh greens and flavourful soup. I can speak Mandarin but am a poor reader so I had to order off the the english menu. I was at first surprised to see that the dumplings weren't the round-shaped bao's but the oblong jiao ze shape - which makes them a messy two-bites. But I was pleasantly surprised when the waitress announced that they were 'jio tsai bao', in other words *chinese* chives which is about as chinese a veg as you can get. It has a distinct flavour that may be an acquired taste for western palates. The wrapper was so thin and the folds so neat - like most chinese kids I was put to work at family dumpling parties and could usually spot my dumpy dumplings even after they were cooked - it is a real art to make beautiful dumplings by hand.
The green onion pancake could have been better layered and flakier but now I'm just nitpicking. The yao tiao and do jang (deep fried donut and warm sweet soybean drink) brought me back to Taiwan mornings.
Yes, I ordered all that food for me and my daughter who still gets most of her nutrients out of a bottle. And yes, I was very full and very happy after that meal.
p.s. excuse the bad pin yin, pure phonetic, but you know what I mean.
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** "ethnic" just seems like too-tidy a word to mean anything non-white