From the plate, they look the same as their pork counterparts - only slightly greener due to some spinach in their flour - but they cost roughly a dollar more, at eight for $11.03 and a dozen for $14.02.įrom the food truck’s original illustrated food menu to the neon “delicious vibes only” sign that now adorns its walls, Yumpling has managed to keep things playful, even while growing up. Their filling is made with a less-common but hearty mix of egg, Chinese spinach, and vermicelli noodles. “People have been asking us about vegetarian dumplings for years,” Jeon says. A small mountain of cilantro, scallion, housemade chile oil, and sesame seeds finishes the dish.įor the new opening, Yumpling has also brought on a long sought-after vegetarian version of its dumplings.
The dumplings are made using intentionally thick dough and are pan-fried to order, a more time-consuming process than boiling or steaming, but one that results in the restaurant’s recognizably chewy tops and crisp bottoms.
The food truck’s namesake dish - its pork dumplings - aren’t the version the co-founders grew up eating, but “they are what we think tastes good,” Jeon says. The drinks are available in nine varieties to start, including taro latte, early grey, and Taiwanese coffee flavors.Ī name like Yumpling doesn’t come from a restaurant’s noodle soup or milk teas, though. New to the brick and mortar restaurant space is also a short menu of bubble teas, which Yu spent several months developing ahead of opening. Between the heaping noodle boiler the restaurant needs to keep up with soup orders and the beef’s four-hour cooking time, “We just couldn’t make it work without a kitchen,” he says. The bowl of soup sounds like a dream, unless one’s cooking out of a food truck, according to Jeon. One is the restaurant’s beef noodle soup, which Jeon refers to as “one of Taiwan’s most iconic dishes.” Housemade noodles, soy egg, and tender slices of braised beef poke their heads out from the restaurant’s dark brown broth, which starts each morning as a pot of beef, soy sauce, cinnamon, and other spices. Each of those dishes appears on the new restaurant’s menu, though they’re dotted among other offerings, including Taiwanese staples the team has had their eyes on for years but never had the space or time to prepare in a food truck kitchen. Kim/YumplingĪt its beloved lunchtime food truck, Yumpling won the hearts of Midtown with just five menu items: an order of pan-fried pork dumplings, a fried chicken sandwich, and rice bowls topped with either fried chicken, braised beef shank, or stir-fried eggplant. It’s an opportunity for the trio to bring new Taiwanese dishes to their menu - that, and begin to make some headway on the mountain of customer requests that they have amassed over the years.įrom left to right: Yumpling co-founders Howie Jeon, Jeff Fann, and Chris Yu Janet S. The new restaurant marks the first time that Yumpling co-founders Jeon, Jeff Fann, and Chris Yu are consistently serving their dumplings for dinner and on weekends, as the bulk of their food truck sales came from weekday office workers. In the two months since, the restaurant has seen socially-distant lines stretch out its front doors most afternoons and recently opened for dinner service, as well. The popular dumpling maker - which started as a stand at the Long Island City flea market in 2015, then grew into a beloved food truck two years later - started serving lunch from a small storefront at 49-11 Vernon Boulevard, between 49th and 50th Avenues, in late August. “Here, we make them the way we like them.”įive years after serving its first dumplings in Queens, Yumpling has returned to the borough to open its first brick-and-mortar restaurant.
“Dumplings look and taste different all across the city,” says Howie Jeon, one of three founders behind cult-favorite Taiwanese food truck Yumpling. A mound of cilantro and a heap of housemade chile oil.
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