vip in the city

New Green Bo

I miss the soup dumplings at the now-closed Joe’s Ginger on Mott (though the Pell Street branch remains.)

Soup dumplings, the Shanghainese onion-shaped pouches of crab, ground pork and broth, seemed to multiply across the city about ten years ago, with Joe’s Shanghai at the epicenter of the explosion. There were owner Joe Si’s sanctioned spinoffs and a huge resurgent interest in Shanghai cuisine overall, which benefited such restaurants as Goody’s (co-owned by Si’s sister, Susan Chan), Evergreen Shanghai Restaurant, and today’s lunchtime venue: New Green Bo on Bayard Street. Though the culinary fad may have cooled a bit since its turn-of-the-century heydey, the dumplings still inspire a diehard following, and debate continues to this day about the city’s best. (Tang Pavilion, really?)

Among their fans is Calvin Trillin, though perhaps for liability reasons, the scalding hot broth-filled dumplings are not a feature of Bud’s “Come Hungry” gastronomic walking tour of downtown, which for the past six years has been one of the most in-demand events of the annual New Yorker Festival.

The New York Times offers this bit of advice:

The safest way is to gently lift the dumpling with chopsticks, clasping it at the pleated area, the strongest part of the dough. Place it on a soupspoon, and carefully nibble a hole in the dumpling wrapper. The soup will flow out into the spoon. Then, use the chopsticks to pop the dumpling into your mouth, and drink the soup from the spoon.

New Green Bo’s dumplings were voted the food most “Worth the Risk of Injury” in the inaugural Independent Food Awards in 2005. And their much-heralded scallion pancakes aren’t bad either.

NGB’s workers, assembling stacked, cabbage-lined steamer trays of their authentically delicate-skinned dumplings for the dinner rush:

There are 2 Comments ... New Green Bo

Qsoz
February 20, 2007

My favorite part of that Slate article:

“Northern China (especially Dongbei and Shangdong), bordering Korea, is a tough place where the people often resemble Koreans and share a similar intransigent personality.”

🙂

vipnyc
February 22, 2007

Oh, those intransigent Koreans!

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