Dumplings, Take Two
D.C. chefs add flare to traditional dumplings.
Travel the world or explore the multitude of immigrant cuisines folded into the United States, and you will find dumpling after dumpling: momo, empanada, ravioli, mandoo. Washington, D.C. is home to many a dumpling-lovin’ culture. Chefs Carlos Delgado and Matt Crowley have taken two traditional dumpling forms—shumai and the lesser-known torikawa gyoza—and developed show-stopping, fine dining-worthy variations for their restaurants.
Carlos Delgado of China Chilcano
Inspired by dumplings he ate on the streets of his native Lima, Chef Carlos Delgado serves a lavish take on the classic pork and shrimp shumai at José Andrés’ Peruvian China Chilcano. With a menu that highlights Chifa and Nikkei cooking, Delgado seasons his shumai with a traditional ginger-garlic-scallion mix that is lightened, freshened and given Peruvian zing with added jicama (there’s also an unexpected hit of peanut butter). Nestled atop each shumai is a quail egg, with its barely-set white and a liquid gold yolk. Delgado’s team cracks the egg into the shumai right before it hits the steamer at pick-up. “It steams and cooks in there, but stays a little runny,” Delgado says. A little runny is a humble way to describe a yolk that gushes through your mouth in a brief river like the richest, most luxurious soup dumpling that you can imagine.
Matt Crowley of Spoken English
Spoken English, Erik Bruner-Yang’s tachinomiya-style, dumpling-sized restaurant behind reception at The Line hotel, is firmly planted in 2018, and so is its most handsome gyoza. Chef de Cuisine Matt Crowley replaces the dough skin with chicken skin à la torikawa gyoza that can be spotted as an occasional bar snack around Japan and Korea. For Crowley and most of his diners, though, this is their first chicken skin dumpling. Crowley pulls the skin off whole chickens, and then wraps it around a sticky rice filling with dried fish and shrimp, macadamia nuts, and myriad other seasonings. To sidestep what could easily become the Texas State Fair of dumpling variations, Crowley brightens the filling with sharp pickled ginger, crunchy edamame, and scallions. After filling, the hefty parcel is tied-off, steamed, air-dried, and then fried until the chicken skin reaches a level of crispness that simple flour-and-water dough can only dream of.
