Dumpling Inn

Another fab meal at Dumpling Inn. We deviated a little from our usual menu and ordered xiao long bao, which is a dumpling/bun hybrid with a little bit of soup along with the filling. It's blasphemy to not consume the soup. As a kid, I would break the skin and dribble out the hot soup because I didn't want to put it all into my mouth at once. My mother would nearly pass out. Nowadays, I still do it, but dribble the soup into my spoon (Chinese soup spoons are best for this), eat the dumpling, then drink the soup.

The filling at Dumpling Inn's XLB's are ok. They use the same filling for the dumplings as they do for the XLB, which isn't a bad thing. I've had tastier fillings, but theirs is pretty good. Their skin, though, is a bit too chewy. Thick is all right, but it shouldn't take too much effort to bite into them. All in all, they're not bad at all.

We also had our usual potstickers, the pork and pickled cabbage noodle soup, and the spicy garlic eggplant with pork. The eggplant had some real kick... whew! The pork and pickled cabbage noodle soup was hearty and filling, as always. The potstickers were, oddly enough, not a showstopper. The bottoms were slightly burnt and they were surprisingly bland.

I heard another patron ask for the spicy garlic eggplant dish and loudly requesting over and over, "Hold the garlic!" For one thing, the owner (who was taking the order) isn't deaf and I detest people who think that raising their voice would make a non-native speaker understand them better. It doesn't and she understood him the first time. The other thing was that this fool is asking for a dish that is, by nature, chock full of garlic. Without it, there would be no sauce. Hold the garlic. Wow.

Granted, to each their own, but I can't help but wonder if this guy loudly orders things like chocolate cake, hold the chocolate. I was very amused.

T-minus two days to San Francisco! G., K., and I are going to look for Shanghai House, a place that should have food similar to Dumpling Inn.