Friday Five
Dumplings are the ultimate comfort food: soft pouches of dough crammed with a variety of tasty fillings that are beloved by cultures from China to Japan to Italy. Luckily, you can tour the world in dumplings without leaving our fair city—and sometimes even your home—with takeout from endless local restaurants offering the dish.
San Francisco is a veritable dumpling paradise, thanks to huge Asian and Russian populations, and it’s hard to pick just five of the best. But we’ve done it. Dumpling fans, read on for our favorites, from new-wave spots that add twists on tradition to old-fashioned stalwarts.
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It’s time to take comfort in comforting the owners of these spots that have delighted us for years and reward them with our patronage in this time of need.
1. Dumpling Time
11 Division Street (DeHaro)
This new-wave eatery in the Design District applies imaginative Western twists to both Chinese and Japanese dumplings, tailoring special sauces to each so chile paste and soy sauce aren’t your only choices. In normal dine-in times, you can eat amid giddy Taiwanese music videos. Here, Shanghai-style soup dumplings (xiao long bao) include traditional morsels with juicy pork, broth, and Shaoxing wine fillings that explode in your mouth. The ingenious Thai-inspired tom yum has a coconut milk and pork belly filling inside a pink beet-skin wrapper. And who can forget the King Dum, a king-sized soup dumpling that fills an entire bamboo basket, straw-sipping required?
The seafood gyoza is a Japanese-style pan-crisped half-moon dumpling featuring shrimp, scallops, crab, and chile butter sauce tucked within a green spinach-skin wrapper. Also not to miss: the shrimp har gow, which tucks shrimp inside a translucent wrapper in cilantro sauce, and lobster siu mai, open-top darlings traditionally filled with shrimp, but here with Maine lobster, served with butter, chives, and white truffle oil.
Open Tuesday through Sunday, 4 to 8:30 p.m. Call 415-525-4797 for takeout; delivery from Caviar or DoorDash.
2. Dragon Beaux
5700 Geary Boulevard (21 Ave.)
Famous for its made-for-Instagram Five Guys dish (xiao long bao in five colors and flavors, each snug in its own little cup): yellow turmeric-skin wrapper stuffed with crab roe, red beet–skin wrapper and filling, green spinach–skin wrapper with kale filling, black squid ink–skin wrapper stuffed with black truffle and white (pork/broth filling). But this fancy Outer Richmond restaurant, decorated with ornately carved stone tables, Chinese art, and scallop-shaped booths, also features harder-to-find Chinese dumplings filled with sea bass, spicy seafood, and crab roe xiao long bao, as well as siu mai, har gow, and other dim sum favorites.
Open 11 to 3 and 5 to 8 p.m. Call 415-333-8899 for takeout; delivery from Grubhub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats.
3. Red Tavern
2229 Clement Street (24 Ave.)
Russians and Ukrainians have sought comfort over legions of long snowy nights from dumplings stuffed with meat (pelmeni) or veggie or sweet (vareniki) fillings. This outpost in Outer Richmond’s Little Russia serves wonderful vareniki stuffed with cherries and sweet cheese and generous dollops of cherry sauce, as well as Siberian-style veal pelmeni and Russian chicken pelmeni, plus beef stroganoff in puff pastry and many Georgian wines (the Caucasus, not the Peachtree State). A pretty spot featuring reddish walls lined with paintings, floral-patterned china and seat cushions, and fresh flowers on the tables, this restaurant was founded by young owner Igor Litvak’s late mother, who also owned a gallery in Sausalito, and her chef friend.
Open Monday through Friday, 5 to 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 3 to 8 p.m. Call 415-750-9090.
4. Bini’s Kitchen
1001 Howard Street (6 St.), 1 Post Street (Market)
Nepalese momos look just like xiao long bao, but they’re chewier, have different fillings, and come with different sauces. Momos stuffed with ground turkey, lamb, or vegetables in a spicy roasted tomato-cilantro sauce are sold by La Cocina graduate Binita Pradhan at her restaurant in SOMA, her kiosk in FiDi (next to Montgomery BART), and her Ferry Building farmers market stand. Hot momos (eight for $10), frozen momo packs (50 for $50, $75 for lamb), and combo dinners ($15 for four momos, plus chicken curry or grilled eggplant; $45 for four people) are available for pickup or delivery.
Open Monday through Friday, 11 to 3 (SOMA), 11 to 2 (FiDi), or Saturday, 10 to 2 (Ferry Building). Call 415-361-6911 or email order@biniskitchen.com.
5. Old Mandarin Islamic
3132 Vicente Street (43 Ave.)
Juicy, handmade lamb dumplings (10 for $10.95) from China’s Muslim, non-pork-eating minority are worth the trek to this seven-table stalwart in Outermost Sunset. Go for the three-flavored dumplings stuffed with beef, shrimp, and egg; hot pot with lamb, mushrooms, tofu, and cilantro in a creamy broth; and “extremely spicy peppers,” a potpourri of five chiles whose Mandarin translation means “spicy enough to kill you.” When this eatery opened back in 1997, few local restaurants served food from northern China, let alone Muslim Chinese food, so its owners, immigrants from Beijing, resolved to rectify the gap. Order online for pickup—no delivery.
