(New York Jewish Week) – What do you get when you combine two of New York City’s most iconic foods, matzah ball soup and Chinese dumplings? You get exactly what it sounds like: a mouth-watering franken-nosh that’s at once familiar and innovative.
Matzah ball soup dumplings can be found at Brooklyn’s Lucky Rabbit Noodles, a 300-square-foot spot in Dumbo that’s quite literally underneath the roaring traffic of the Manhattan Bridge on the corner of Plymouth Street and Anchorage Place.
The dish, according to Lucky Rabbit’s owner and chef, Jeremy Dean, is inspired by his love of matzah ball soup. “If I’m at a diner, I’m ordering matzah ball soup,” Dean told the New York Jewish Week, explaining that the classic Ashkenazi comfort dish is one of his favorite New York foods. “I don’t have any Jewish affiliation or anything.”
At Lucky Rabbit — which serves all types of Asian-inspired noodle dishes — the matzah ball soup dumplings are served four to an order for $6. The innovative dish includes four dumplings, made with dumpling wrappers sourced from just over the bridge in Chinatown, that are filled with crumbled housemade matzah balls, ground chicken, onion, carrots and celery before being steamed in their own mini-tin. Upon cooking, chicken broth is ladled over the dumplings and its all topped with dill and fried shallots.
Dean told the New York Jewish Week that he’d tried the matzah ball ramen at Williamsburg’s Jewish-Japanese restaurant Shalom Japan and was inspired to play with that Asian-Ashkenazi flavor combination. “It’s kind of a different take on that,” he said.
Though they are called “soup dumplings,” Lucky Rabbit’s version isn’t made like traditional Chinese soup dumplings (xiao long bao), where the broth is wrapped inside the dumpling paper.
“I try to stay away from authentic things,” Dean said. “I had the authentic soup dumpling, xiao long bao, on the menu for a minute but I wanted to make the flavors a little different anyway.” He added that xiao long bao are very complicated to make — and he’s been the only employee for two of the three years he’s been running the business. (In the last year, a dishwasher and second chef have joined the team.)
Before Lucky Rabbit, Dean, who is Mexican and Salvadoran, ran Vodega, a vegan deli and bodega in the same spot for several months in 2020. He transformed the space into Lucky Rabbit in early 2021, partly because he felt like there wasn’t a lot of great Asian food in the neighborhood, where he’s lived for 13 years.
The dining scene in the formerly industrial, now upscale neighborhood has been shifting in recent years: Food hall Time Out Market opened in May 2019, while a new Israeli restaurant, Nina, opened in Dumbo in November.
At Lucky Rabbit, the matzah ball soup dumplings have been popular, Dean said — just that morning, a couple had placed an order for 300 dumplings that they could keep in their freezer.
On the evening of the New York Jewish Week’s visit earlier this week, Jewish comedian Liz Glazer happened to be in the restaurant to try the dumplings herself. “First, I’m just appreciating the dill and the fried onions,” she said. “I imagine this is going to be like a big texture party.”
“It tastes like matzah ball soup and I love that it has the crispy onion — my mom’s [soup] didn’t have that,” she said after trying a bite. “This is great. It’s a real fusion.”
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