A beginning. Spicy Moon, Chelsea

Our dumpling progress begins, as New York tradition requires, with delivery. The child remarks that delivery dumplings are not as good as the ones you get at the restaurant or the ones daddy makes (awww). Nonetheless, Spicy Moon Chelsea’s pan-fried vegetable dumplings were, in my opinion, pretty good. Was that shepherd’s purse in the filling, mixed with soft tofu and cabbage, or just ordinary spinach? Anyway, certainly more flavorful and interesting than the median vegetable dumpling of my acquaintance, with a nice chewy wrapper that survived the rigors of delivery pretty well.

Source: Spicy Moon Chelsea

Dumpling type: fried vegetable dumplings

Modality: delivery

Adult rating: 🥟🥟🥟🥟

Child rating: 🥟🥟

The rest of the meal was very good. Vegetarian Sichuanese! There were some excellent Chinese options where we were before, but not that. My reading of Fuchsia Dunlop suggests that Spicy Moon’s approach of substituting a mixture of vegetables, mushrooms, plain tofu, and tofu skin for meats in braises is probably non-traditional. But it was appealing to us, perhaps more so than classical “mock chicken” and other deep-fried things.

(A note on “New York tradition”: I have no idea if it’s traditional.)