One of the first food hobbies-turned-businesses to come out of the pandemic has matured into a casual counter-service restaurant that feels like it’s been here all along.
Saturday Dumpling Co. (formerly known as Saturday Dumpling Club) is spouses and co-founders Peter Bian and Linda Cao’s wildly successful weekly dumpling pop-up. Their setup gradually showed signs of restaurant potential when they started offering hot food specials, showing off Bian’s culinary skills with social-media-friendly twists on the foods he grew up with in northern China.
But the star was and always will be the dumplings. When Saturday Dumpling Co. began, the dumplings came frozen, to be cooked at home. Now, at the long-awaited northeast Minneapolis restaurant, they’re doing the cooking for us — and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Location and hours: 519 Central Av. NE., Mpls., saturdaydumpling.com. Open Wed.-Sat. 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
The food: Start with the dumplings, always. There are three classic flavors available at all times ($13), plus a rotating “dumpling of the moment” for $2 more. The restaurant opened with Bian’s La Chang, or Chinese sausage, as the special. Get it. The pan-fried dumplings have one crisped edge but remain pliable, perfect for dunking into the tangy OG Dumpling Sauce or, our personal favorite, minced ginger and scallion. The platter of six dumplings comes with a good helping of rainbow slaw (cabbage and carrots, mainly) and housemade pickled cucumbers and celery.
But the dumplings aren’t the only thing that made this operation go viral, with lines around the block for weekend pickups when it was selling its products from its north Minneapolis commissary kitchen. The scallion pancake burrito, offered only occasionally back then, took off and has landed on the menu here permanently ($16). You can get three fillings (a rich red braised pulled pork, shatteringly crisp sambal chicken, or braised eggplant spread and cumin potatoes), wrapped in that pancake or in the form of a rice bowl (also $16). We preferred the rice bowl, which allowed the different flavors and textures to collide in endless combinations.
Never lacking, back when it was a dumpling pop-up or now as a restaurant, is razor-sharp attention to detail. Take the cumin fries, some of the best fries we’ve had all year. Their craggy edges get a dusting of a housemade spice blend that starts with cumin seeds that Bian imports from Xi’an, the eastern end of China’s Silk Road. He toasts them and grinds them with chiles and a sprinkling of salt, sugar, white pepper and the flavor bomb of MSG. “It’s actually really simple,” he said, as if we all just happened to have the one of the world’s best sources for cumin in our pantries.
You can get those uber-fragrant fries on the side, plus more pickles and rice. For dessert, a miso chocolate chip cookie or “golden cloud bites” of bread that you dip in sweetened condensed milk. And that’s it. It’s a short and easily customizable menu that could probably be replicated in infinite locations. We can only hope.
