vip in the city

Shanghai Cafe

Happy Brooklyn-Queens (and Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island) Day!

Somebody really liked this place, so we made a return visit for the xiao long bao. This time, at my request, we ordered a fresh bamboo steamer full of the pork with crabmeat and crab roe soup dumplings. We were seated at the same pink-flooded table as last time, so no photos: by now, though, you know what these “little basket buns” look like anyway.

These really are delicious. It occurs to me that although I generally prefer a thinner dumpling skin, Shanghai Cafe’s heartier version may be better suited for take-out, minimizing the leaking and breakage that I imagine would otherwise claim a couple of dumpling casualties.

Calvin Trillin, in a New Yorker  piece that was later included in his book Feeding a Yen, wrote that Jewish connoisseurs sometimes refer to these pork and crab soup dumplings as “double-trayf specials” (trayf, or tref, is the Yiddish term for “not kosher.”) Cloven-hooved animals AND shellfish… hard to get much more off-limits than that.