Central Florida’s foodie folk have a healthy attraction to soup dumplings. Not to be confused with dumpling soup. Soup dumplings – xiao long bao in Chinese – are purse-shaped dumplings that instead of minced meat or vegetables have soup inside.
It’s a neat trick that usually has first-time xiao long baoers wondering how they get the soup inside. But there’s no one in the kitchen with a syringe painstakingly injecting broth into the dumplings. Instead, the soup is reduced and cooled to a gelatinous consistency so that cubes of gelatin can be placed inside the wonton for shaping. When heated, voila – or whatever the Chinese word is for voila – the soup “melts” and heats as the dumpling cooks.
To get an idea of what the finished product should be, visit KungFu Kitchen, a restaurant in the Lake Buena Vista area from New York chef Peter Song. (The name of Song’s two New York restaurants are Kung Fu Kitchen, but for some reason the Orlando shop is KungFu, so we’ll go with that.)
The LBV restaurant was bustling when I visited it for a recent lunch. I was shown to one of the only available seats, at a larger table than I needed, and was soon joined by another couple. Fine, the place exudes a communal conviviality.
I ordered the pork xiao long bao, presented in a bamboo steamer with a pair of metal tongs. The tricky part is picking a dumpling up with the tongs without piercing the skin and spilling the soup. Once you have one, pick it up with your chopsticks (or hands if you want), nibble a hole in the side and slurp out the soup. Or you can just shove the whole thing into your mouth, no one will judge.
Song’s other specialty is noodles, so I also got the hand-cut beef noodles, which had thinly sliced beef in broth over wonderfully chewy long noodles, with bok choy and pepper sauce to give it some delicious heat.
Service was gracious and swift (my beef noodles came out before my dumplings, which I would have preferred as an appetizer, but it didn’t matter).
Thanks to Bruce Lee and other martial artists, Americans tend to associate kung fu with fighting. But the term actually refers to a mastery of any discipline. Knowing that, Song’s restaurant is aptly named.
KungFu Kitchen is at 8466 Palm Pkwy, Orlando, in the Vista Center Shoppes (map). It is open for lunch and dinner daily. The Orlando restaurant does not seem to have its own website. The phone number is 407-778-1649.
