Last weekend Noele and I went to Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown. Joe's is famous for its soup dumplings, scrumptious steamed dumplings with soup inside. Eating them is a bit of a tricky business, since biting into one earns you a burst of scalding hot soup. In order to do it properly you have to place one in a large spoon and puncture it with a chopstick (or other handy utensil), then drain out the soup into your spoon. After you've released the soup, you can either sip the soup out and then eat the dumpling, or catch the soup in the spoon while you eat the dumpling and then slurp up the remaining soup. After much experimentation I prefer the latter, since you can keep some of the soup inside your dumpling while eating it, without danger of burning yourself.
Above is my last dumpling, post-puncture (the soup has drained out underneath it). It took a while for me to get the hang of this without spilling, as you can see by the sizable amount of soup that has dripped into the bowl below.
The dumplings are delicious and meaty; the soup in there is extraordinarily thick and flavorful. If you're imagining a wonton soup inside out, don't. The soup is so much better than that. Luckily for Noele there were some great veggie options as well (she got a shrimp noodle bowl, which she loved). We liked it so much that we went back less than a week later.
