Stretch your taste buds
As today’s Curious Food Festival gets under way, Chris Schulz samples five tempting delights.
They’re made by my mum, designed by me.
When Weekend arrives at Sumthin Dumplin’s O’Connell St shop, it’s just after the lunchtime rush and there’s a cardboard sign on the door that reads: “Sold out.”
Owner Shane Liu is standing out front, enjoying some fresh air. He opened his small shop just four weeks ago, and he’s sold out of his hand-rolled dumplings every lunchtime since.
He sells out at dinner time too. Popular? One surfer chap drove in from Piha seven days in a row to get them.
There’s not enough space in Liu’s shoebox shop to make more dumplings — he says he’s already at peak capacity. He and his small team go through 400kg of dumpling dough a day.
“I refuse to freeze them,” he tells Weekend, as staff prep for dinner by rolling pastry wrappers on a small bench.
To Liu, authenticity is key. There are no shortcuts taken when it comes to his dumplings, which use his mother’s recipes cooked when Liu was young.
“As a kid, I dunked them in tomato sauce,” he laughs. They’ve come a long way since then.
Today, his beef and cheese dumplings are made with wholemeal dough and two types of cheese. They are served with crispy chillis, peanuts and spring onions.
His vegan option, The Monk, comes with a tofu, shitake mushroom and bok choy filling, wrapped in pastry tinged green by spinach. They’re the ones customers take Insta photos of as soon as they get them outside.
Liu’s mother, Lan Ni, is still involved, working in the kitchen, hand-rolling the pastry.
“They’re made by my mum, designed by me,” quips Liu. The family connection doesn’t stop there: his brother helps out between university lectures, his aunt’s in the kitchen too, and his dad, a plumber, occasionally pops in to help out.
It’s a necessity: Liu’s dumplings are in demand. There are often people standing at the door when Sumthin Dumplin opens at 11am, and queues can stretch down the footpath. In the hour Weekend spent there, Liu turned away a dozen people, telling them to return for dinner.
At today’s Curious Food Festival, he’ll sell four packs of his beef and cheese dumplings, as well as his vegan option. He’ll also offer a new scallop dumpling that’s still being taste-tested.
Liu’s attitude is it’s not worth doing something unless his heart and soul goes into it. He chucked in his high-stress tech job — he says it “turned into Game of Thrones” — to open Sumthin
Dumplin, and he couldn’t be happier.
Ask Liu whether anyone else should follow his lead, quit their day job and chase their dreams, and he points to the neon sign greeting his customers. It reads: “Sumthin we shoulda done a long time ago.”
Sumthin Dumplin, 12 O’Connell St, sumthindumplin.co.nz