Dumpling Galaxy
CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times
When I am on my way to a big dinner at a restaurant in Flushing, Queens, I like to limber up by eating a dozen of Helen You’s dumplings.
For the last eight years, Ms. You has been the chef and proprietor of the Tianjin Dumpling House, which is not so much a house as a narrow shaft of elbow room behind a sneeze guard in the basement of a Chinese food-vendors’ market on Main Street. The first dumpling of hers that I tried had a sea-bass stuffing cut with minced ginger, which gave bracing clarity to the few drops of broth sealed inside. It was so satisfying that at first I felt no need to branch out.
The dumplings were irresistibly priced, though, at about $5 a dozen, and I began to experiment with new ones: lamb and chopped zucchini humming with Sichuan peppercorns, maybe, or pork with threads of fresh dill. These were wildly good, too.
One day, I noticed a sign inviting me to pick my own custom dumpling fillings from a grid of 24 ingredients. This paralyzed me. Ms. You clearly had a kind of genius for creating miniature worlds of flavor. Who was I to tell her what she ought to fold into her circles of dough? It was as if somebody had handed me a box of feathers, bones, beaks and flesh and said, “Here, build a parrot.”
What I wanted was more of Ms. You’s recipes, not mine, and I got my wish earlier this year when Ms. You opened Dumpling Galaxy a few blocks from her original stall. Dumpling Galaxy sits back from the street, inside a shiny new mall it shares with a Korean-French bakery and a purveyor of sparkly false eyelashes. Ms. You designed the striking, modern interior herself, splashing bold Chinese red across walls with a basket-weave relief and building deep semiprivate booths, each with its own TV screen showing highlights of the 100 dumplings on the menu.
The Dumpling Channel goes heavy on cross-section shots that reveal the central core of filling. Take a good look, because this is a sight you should never see if you want to get the most out of a meal at Dumpling Galaxy. Resist the exploratory nibble. Dip one side in black vinegar and soy, and paint it with chile oil if you like, then pocket the whole thing in your mouth. It won’t gush with a waterfall of broth. It will, however, hold a few drops of liquid shed by the filling as the dumpling boiled. Those drops belong to you.
Sometimes those juices taste like fresh green herbs, as when Ms. You mixes cilantro with minced lamb, or dill with excellent softly scrambled eggs. Sometimes they combine those qualities with a whiplash of heat, as in the head-twistingly good spicy beef dumpling, seasoned with scallions, fresh red and green chiles, and searing dried chile sauce.
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As a young girl in Tianjin, China, Ms. You was taught to cook by her mother and grandparents. Her dumplings are sturdy, knobby, domestic creatures in the Northern Chinese tradition. Sometimes you see the ghostly outline of the fillings through the shiny white skins, and sometimes you can’t. But her dumplings are stuffed to order, and Ms. You fine-tunes them with the sensitivity of a natural cook who listens to her ingredients. Mixing shrimp with two varieties of celery, the more bitter and self-assured Chinese and the sweeter, shyer Western kind, and using both stalks and leaves, she builds exhilarating harmonies.
It would be a miracle on Main Street if all 100 varieties at Dumpling Galaxy were equally lovable. They aren’t. The one with shrimp, scallops and crab meat didn’t deliver the sweet seafood luxury it promised. Steamed har gow were less juicy than those wheeled around on the best dim sum carts. My strategy is to seek out the proprietary blends, which justify prices that can be slightly higher (as much as $7.95 for six) than those at other places in Flushing, including Tianjin Dumpling House.
I’ve eaten entire meals that delivered less flavor than a single one of Ms. You’s dumplings stuffed with terrific little meatballs of duck and shiitakes. And if those hadn’t cheered me up, the fried dumplings would. Ms. You pours watery cornstarch into the pan, which bubbles and browns into a shatteringly thin, dumpling-studded pancake. Cracking that crust, I felt like the happiest guy in the galaxy.
That feeling wavered whenever I had to lean out of my booth with one arm extended for minutes at a time to ask for water or the check or for empty dishes to be cleared. It was like hailing a cab on Broadway at 5 p.m., but less effective. As time dragged on, I wondered why nobody had invented Uber for waiters.
Looking at the tables of Chinese families, I noticed that their dumpling consumption was considerably less piggish than mine. They might share a single order, a mere six dumplings, before moving on to the dishes from Northern China, Hunan and Fujian on the rest of the menu. (One cook specializes in each region.)
I came to see the wisdom of allowing fish and vegetables to supplement all the boiled flour I was ingesting. The Hunanese preserved pork stir-fried with stubby lengths of pickled long beans was superb, both fiery and tart. Triple delight vegetables (green chiles, barely tender potato and eggplant so creamy it may as well be pudding) was an unusually good version of the Dongbei standby. Whole fish with spicy bean sauce was a hit at my table, even if we did use the marvelous sauce to obscure the fish’s slightly muddy flavor.
You can find these dishes elsewhere, but no other kitchen offers such an embarrassment of dumpling riches, including dessert. Some sweet dumplings are pinched in dough like the savory ones, such as tart dried hawthorn berries with white wood ears, or pear with eight treasures, which I now think of as fruitcake pirogi.
Others, called tang yuan, are tinted orbs of dough that are springy and chewy, like mochi. My favorite was the pumpkin-flavored globe with a sugary paste of black sesame at the core. These orange globes arrived, not on a plate like the others, but bobbing in a thick, clear, steaming soup. I could stare at ingredient lists all day and never come up with a parrot like this.