Dainty Dumpling House

 

Bianca: My friend Sonia (now known as the ‘BTB – Bride to be’) and I scheduled a catch-up, post house move. The long and arduous move from Concord West to Concord a whole 4 minutes away had occupied a great deal of my time the last two weeks or so.

After giving ‘BTB’ a choice between Indian, a cuisine she is not so familiar with or dumplings, she chose the latter. With both of us having a weakness for the bite sized delights as well as wanting to stay fairly local, having heard of the recently opened ‘Dainty Dumpling House’ the decision was made.

I had actually never ventured that far up Rhodes, towards the station. I was pleasantly surprised to see a variety of new restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and a Mooberry all within a one block radius, just a few minutes’ walk from Rhodes train station.

‘Dainty Dumpling house’ opened in late February and is a great addition to the Rhodes dining scene. There is limited seating inside the restaurant but they offer some of the best views of the kitchen and all of the dumpling making action. Most of the seating is outdoors, under cover. With what seems to be on trend these days in cafés the tables were on the small side, granted we ordered a few different things to get a broad sense of the menu – that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

You have to order and pay at the front counter, so we sat down first to peruse the menu and then ordered. Food and drinks are then served to you at the tables.

Sharing family style we got a wide selection of goodies. To start we shared a serving of four ‘Pork Dumplings – Xiao Long Bao’, four ‘Vegetable Dumplings’ and with the kitchen mistaking our order of ‘Spicy Shrimp and Pork Wontons’ for three ‘Prawn Spring Rolls’ we happily accepted the mistaken spring rolls. That was a very fortunate happy accident. Those spring rolls were some of the best spring rolls I have eaten. With generous chunks of fleshy tasty prawn pieces, they were delicious smothered in sweet chilli sauce. The dumplings (incorrectly labelled ‘Dumpings’ on the menu) were very flavourful, the dumpling cases were paper thin, leaving no offending doughy aftertaste. The vegetable dumplings were wonderful paired with the spicy chilli sauce accompanying the soy and vinegar on the table in its own caddy, great touch.

For mains we shared the ‘Noodles wok fried with shredded BBQ Pork in premium Soya sauce’ to accompany the spicy ‘Crispy Fried Chicken’. The noodles made a fabulous companion dish, with balanced flavours. The chicken was fabulously spicy, definitely a hot one, with lots of little red chilli’s that will set your mouth on fire – you’ve been warned.  The only thing I found a little odd about this dish was the texture, I for the life of me thought I was eating squid, it had a very similar texture to that of a salt and pepper calamari.

 

Dainty Dumpling house is a fantastic addition to the Rhodes dining scene, I cannot wait for my next ‘Dumping’ fix.

Bianca

V.B.A