July 17, 2008
By: Brian Freedman
bfreedman@aroundphilly.com
I still remember my first taste of soup dumpling. It was back in 2000 when I still lived in New York, and a friend of mine was visiting from Osaka. He’d never been to the U.S. before, and after running him through the fried chicken – mac and cheese – pitcher of Bud routine his first night in town, all he really wanted the next day was a Shanghai soup dumpling to center himself again. My roommate, a Chinatown aficionado of sorts, said he knew just the place.
So the next night we hopped the subway down to Joe’s Shanghai, a restaurant that is generally agreed to have the best dumplings outside Shanghai itself (at least in the U.S.). By midway through my second slurp, I was thoroughly hooked.
Several years later I moved back to Philadelphia, and I’m still convinced that the hardest part of that change was that I had to quit those delicacies cold turkey.
But several months ago, I’d begun to hear murmurings of a spot in our own Chinatown that did them just as well. Of a hole-in-the-wall place where the food was cheap and the soup dumplings were authentic. In other words, rumors of a Shanghai Shangri-La.
How magnificently true those rumors were.
The soup dumplings at Dim Sum Garden—they’re also called steamed buns, an unfortunate moniker that conjures up images, for me at least, of microwave Pillsbury dinner rolls—were nothing short of majestic: rich enough, and hot enough, and balanced enough to literally take your breath away.
The self-contained broth was the highlight, a thick, heady slurp studded with microscopic bits of pork that had floated free from the bolus of it on the bottom. It was a complex affair that, as much as anything else I’ve tasted recently at any restaurant in town, seemed to embody the definition of savory. The only danger here is eating all of them, and ruining your appetite for the other treats on this deceptively straightforward menu.
Hand-made noodles also stood out from the Chinatown pack, and were particularly well employed in the beef brisket noodle, a heaping plateful of tangled noodles possessed of an otherworldly sense of balance between springy and toothsome. Fabulous on its own, the texture of the noodles was supplemented with slow-cooked chunks of brisket whose fork-tenderness reminded me of top-notch short ribs.
Much of Dim Sum Garden’s success lies in its refusal to overconceive anything. This also poses a number of unique risks, of course—the simplest preparations are often the riskiest ones, as there’s less flashiness to cover up any flaws—but the Garden avoids them well.
Sautéed Shanghai bok choy was an emerald-green hill whose saltiness was attenuated well by the water the vegetables had released. Scallion pancake, about the thickness of its IHOP counterpart, was a multi-layered, springtime-sweet affair protected on all sides by a snappy crust. This, like the soup dumplings, was impossible to stop eating, and equally tasty on its own as with spoonfuls of chiles, ginger sauce or soy. Only the cold cucumber fell short: There was so much sesame oil slicking the individual slices that their own bright flavor was difficult to discern.
But for $3, I can find forgiveness in my fat-clogged heart. In fact, at these prices—aside from the $8.50 that jumbo shrimp will run you, the most expensive dishes top out at $6.75—Dim Sum Garden could get away with a lot less. But the focus here is unequivocally on the food, and it seems as if most of the money that each dish costs goes toward it and not much else: Service ranges from helpful to indifferent, and the décor, a hospital-green motif set off by the neon in the windows and the droning of the busses revving their engines outside, beneath the 11th Street overpass, is not exactly mood-setting.
But your first bite of that Shanghai steamed bun will render everything else obsolete. That, after all, is the power of a truly great dish. It has the ability to sweep you away from so many of the temporal concerns that obscure our perception of the senses the rest of the time. And good soup dumplings—Dim Sum Garden’s soup dumplings—fit snugly into that category. I just wish my buddy from Osaka were here to see how far Philly has come.
Visit Dim Sum Garden
