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Food guide

How to find good dumplings

Dumplings are a texture problem. The filling is usually the easy part; the wrapper — its thickness, its elasticity, whether it tears — is what separates a shop that makes them from a shop that defrosts them.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Wrappers made there — Hand-rolled wrappers are slightly uneven in thickness, thicker at the pleat and thin at the centre. Machine wrappers are perfectly uniform and usually thicker overall. You can see this before you taste it.
  • They hold their shape and their juice — A soup dumpling that has leaked into the steamer was either overfilled or rested too long. One or two in a basket is normal; all of them is not.
  • A crisp base with a soft top — For potstickers and gyoza, both textures should be present. Uniformly soft means they were steamed only; uniformly hard means they were fried from frozen.
  • A short menu, or an enormous specialised one — Either a shop doing four kinds properly, or a dim sum house with a full kitchen. The dangerous middle is a general restaurant with dumplings as one section.
  • People folding them in the window — The most direct possible evidence, and common enough that it is worth looking for.

What to order

  • Xiao long bao — Shanghai soup dumplings. Thin-skinned, filled with aspic that melts into broth. The measure is the number of pleats and whether the skin survives the lift.
  • Potstickers / guotie — Pan-fried on one side, steamed on the other. Often with a lacy starch skirt connecting them, which is a sign of care.
  • Har gow and siu mai — The two dim sum benchmarks. Har gow's translucent shrimp dumpling is the hardest thing on a dim sum cart to make well.
  • Gyoza — Japanese, thinner-skinned and more garlicky than Chinese jiaozi, almost always pan-fried.
  • Momo — Nepali and Tibetan, steamed or fried, served with a tomato-and-chilli sauce that is half the dish.
  • Pierogi, manti, khinkali, mandu — The same idea across Poland, Turkey, Georgia and Korea. Khinkali in particular are worth going out of your way for.

Where to find dumplings

Open listings put 136 dumpling houses across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 14 San Francisco, CA 7 Seattle, WA 5 Los Angeles, CA 5 Houston, TX 5 San Gabriel, CA 3 Portland, OR 3 Las Vegas, NV 3

Campuses with the most within a mile

NYU 6 The New School 5 Baruch 5 Pace University 4 BMCC 4 Seattle U 3 CUNY Graduate Center 3 HCC 2 FIT 2 NYCCT 2

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

A dumpling search reads for hand-made and hand-folded language, named styles, and reviews describing the wrapper rather than the filling. Dim sum service style is treated as a separate signal, so searching for dim sum prioritises places doing cart or made-to-order service over places that merely list dumplings.

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Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

What to eat when nothing sounds good Where to eat with a toddler Where to eat with a big group