Dumplings for Dinner

For dinner, I had some shrimp dumplings, "seafood cheese puffs", and an iced tea.

The location was Auntie Chang's Dumpling House. Jon is hopelessly addicted to dumplings in all their incarnations, and AC's is the epicenter of that obsession. Literally, every time we've driven by AC's for the last SIX years, he's had a Pavlovian freak-out of epic proportions- "ohmigod! AUNTIE CHANG'S. They have the BEST dumplings EVER!!!(*drool*)". It became a little game after we moved here, me shooting down his dumpling cravings every time he suggested we go there, just because he seemed so weirdly obsessed with the place, and I figured it wouldn't measure up to the monolith of perfection he remembered.

So, I finally gave in. The dumplings were very good: clearly homemade, with chunks of shrimp and shrimpy goo inside. Each table was stocked with eight or so sauces- ginger, chili paste, hot mustard, "sweet", duck?, and several unidentifiable others. The outside was nicely chewy, they were sweet without being mushy or cloying, and their "sweet" sauce was wonderful. The "sweet" sauce wasn't actually sweet, but I have no idea what was in it. It tasted like a very mild vinegar, congealed into sauce consistency and dotted with little fragments of citrus fruit.

I needed something else to make a dinner-sized meal, so I ordered the seafood cheese puffs. They were beautifully fried, and came out hot and crispy. The downside is that Jon and I spent the meal debating whether they were seafood puffs or cheese puffs. No seafood or seafood flavors were found. I thought I saw something pinkish in the filling at one point, but I think it was the lighting (strings of Christmas lights, heavy on the red).

I'd go back for more dumplings, and their service was great, but AC's is not worth obsessing over. In any case, Jon says their dumplings have lost their place in his heart to another dumpling house, Doozo, which is famous for the "Dumpling Nazi" owner. It's in an office building food court downtown, and I was never impressed, but I think I'll have to try it again as some sort of dumpling wars thing.