Kingdom of Dumplings

Could there be a smaller restaurant in San Francisco? If there were more than ten tables, it would be a surprise to me, but hole-in-the-wall or not, this restaurant had more things on the menu that I had never seen before, so it was a pleasure to try something new. Ambiance aside, this was a great "little" find in a city teaming with restaurants.

When ordering a cucumber salad, you might expect a cold dish of sliced raw cucumbers with a dressing of some sort. You might never expect a sauteed dish piled high with cucumbers that were cooked with garlic and dressed with soy sauce and rice wine.  It never occurred to me and that made this dish all the more exciting. Seeing cucumber served that way encouraged thought of other uses for cooked cucumbers.

The processed lamb meat on the platter in the photo above was another matter entirely. With the exception of sandwiches, I had never before seen lamb served cold. This wasn't just sliced lamb served cold, it was a processed lamb product and although it was unusual, it did taste good. Just don't tell me what "parts" were used in the processing, I don't want to know. Something like a lunch meat in texture, it combined well with the green onion pancake we had also ordered. The green onion pancake was the only thing that arrived as we had expected, but it was better than most, since it was thicker.

  

As restaurant "namesake", we had hoped the dumplings would be good and they did not disappoint us. We started with the pork and chive dumplings, then finished up with the lamb and Chinese vegetable dumpling seen cut in half in the above photo. I have no idea what the mystery vegetable was, but will attest to the fact that these were my favorite of the 2 selections we had made. I believe the dumplings were all made by hand, because of the thickness of the dough. They were very filling and had we known that they came 12 to an order and that they were so big, we would have ordered less. The Shanghai Donut in the last photo was our dessert. How this black bean "bun" became a "donut" is anyone's guess. It was a sweet finish to a sweet new experience in Chinese dining.

There is no website for this restaurant, but from Menu Pages I've  linked the Kingdom of Dumpling Menu.

1713 Taraval St San Francisco CA 94116 (415) 566-6143