When Chinese American food historian, film producer and former New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee says Hayes Valley’s Dumpling Home is her favorite place for dumplings when she visits San Francisco, I’m all ears — and ready to eat. 

On a sunny Wednesday, there’s already a line outside the Gough Street corner restaurant before it opens for lunch at 11:30 a.m. A few chairs along the exterior wall show that a line to get in is normal, which is impressive considering that the place only opened in the fall of 2020. After making the cut of first-round diners to get inside the dining room, I grabbed a dark wooden table and spotted Lee walking in under the high ceilings. Appropriately, she carried a stuffed smiling dumpling plushie and wore a matching enamel pin, both from A Jar of Pickles, run by her friend’s sister.

I’m thrilled to meet Lee. Her iconic Chinese American food history book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food” (Twelve, 2008), helped me to embrace the historical significance of Chinese American food, like orange chicken and chop suey. It explored other factors of the Chinese American (or American Chinese) food ecosystem, like undocumented and underpaid service workers. That impacted both my cultural identity and food writing, and helped pave the way for a generation of food writers to explore things like how diaspora and place affect a cuisine’s evolution. 

After co-producing the documentary version of the book, “The Search for General Tso,” Lee fell in love with film producing and still pursues it today. Among Lee’s other current projects are an AI literature website called Writing Atlas, and an MITeen Press book, “The Hanmoji Handbook,” which uses emojis to teach Han Chinese characters.

Lee’s interest in dumplings isn’t just academic, though. 

“Here’s the most fun fact about me and dumplings,” Lee told me. “My recipe is a ground turkey recipe. I grew up in New York City, but not in a Chinatown. You couldn’t buy ground pork in an American supermarket, but you could buy ground beef and ground turkey. Ground beef is a little bit too dense for dumplings. We basically adapted the Chinese techniques for an American version.”

Her American version also includes “lettuce, for the green,” an easily sourced substitute for the more traditional Napa cabbage. “Another good flavor ingredient is ketchup. A lot,” she added. The complex flavors of ketchup, encompassing sweet, salty, and sour, do a lot of heavy lifting in flavoring the filling.

As for cooking technique? “I only steam in desperation. Frying is much more celebratory,” she said. Lee makes batches of dumplings in the hundreds — sometimes 1,000 — at dumpling parties she throws at festivals where her films screen, like at SXSW and most recently at the Tribeca Film Festival in June for “Our Son,” starring Billy Porter, and the documentary “Against All Enemies.” Her array of homemade dipping sauces ranges from a classic soy sauce-vinegar number to a bourbon-and-maple combo.

Dumpling Home owner Jimmy Shen can relate to Lee’s Chinese American flavor stories. In a phone interview, Shen, who recently opened Dumpling Story in Pacific Heights, described his restaurant’s food as “80% Chinese and 20% American.” It’s notable that Shen, who immigrated to San Francisco in 1985 as a teenager, is from Canton in southern China, a region not known for xiao long bao or some of Dumpling Home’s other famed favorites, like the pan-fried juicy pork bun (sheng jian bao or SJB, as they are increasingly referred to). He has, however, worked in the San Francisco restaurants since age 16, including opening and still running the popular Japanese restaurant Otoro Sushi in Hayes Valley.

Through experience, research and design, Dumpling Home’s food has been a runaway success. Shen sampled dumplings from all around the Bay Area and worked with his chefs to develop recipes to his own taste. “I originally wanted to call the restaurant Home, but that name was taken. I want people to feel like they’re at home,” Shen said. Dumpling Story followed the DH naming convention, and Shen chose Story because of all that’s happened in the past few years, like opening during a pandemic only to become arguably one of the best dumpling restaurants in the city.

Lee’s favorite item at Dumpling Home — juicy pork bao — is listed under the “Pan Fried” section of the menu. The Chinese characters read as sheng jian bao, a Shanghai style of pan-fried bao that yields a pleasant crunch on the bottom, contrasting with the pillowy, chewy steamed white bao that mingles with juicy, seasoned ground pork on the inside. Dumpling Home’s version is a standout both aesthetically and taste-wise, with a taller, slimmer appearance, fried high up the sides. Other SJBs tend to have just the bottoms fried. DH’s SJB also have a thinner bao dough, moving its SJB closer to the dumpling side of the bao-dumpling spectrum. And a huge bonus that is also a fair warning — bite carefully. If not, it’s almost guaranteed that the plentiful hot meat juice will shoot across the table, which is a frequent occurrence at the restaurant. It happened at our table, but I won’t snitch on the culprit.

Shen partially shared why DH’s SJB are unique. “Our flour is made differently, a little bit mochi-style. Lots of restaurants try to learn, but it’s part of our secret,” he said.

Dumpling Home’s XLB, another popular order at Dumpling Home — try the numb and spicy pork xiao long bao that is large, satin-skinned and tingly on the tongue — also has a unique flour mixture. “We can make it thin, but it won’t break. That’s a lot of experience from the chef to do so, but it’s not the regular formula from the old times,” said Shen, explaining how DH’s food is slightly nontraditional while still retaining a Chinese flair.

Other items we ordered also represented a mixture of more traditional Chinese dishes, like cold jellyfish salad (often only found on Chinese banquet menus) and dry-fried ginger-and-green onion noodles, to a few surprises, like stir-fried okra with fresh garlic sauce. There were no misses among the items we ordered, like tender boiled shrimp-egg-chive-mushroom dumplings and straightforward boiled pork dumplings with sesame sauce and house-made red chili oil.

Following the success of Dumpling Home, Shen officially opened Dumpling Story on Fillmore Street on June 24, to instant popularity. At the new location, Shen added a couple of “fun dumplings,” like kung pao chicken (spelled “Gong Bao” on the menu) and Mongolian beef dumplings because “they’re iconic dishes that represent Chinese food for a lot of Americans,” he said. He also added a lava egg yolk bao as a savory-sweet dessert, with a presentation similar to the pan-fried juicy pork bao. It’s still to be determined whether or not the new items will migrate to Dumpling Home’s menu down the road.

Sometimes, Shen said, details make the difference. 

“The details make you a success or not a success,” Shen said of the adjustments he’s made to each dish at his restaurants. “You have to have your own creation and your own product to stand out.” 

Certainly, Dumpling Home is a cut above the sea of dumpling restaurants that have appeared in the past few years. May it long feel like a food home for many more rounds of squirting juicy bao to come.

Dumpling Home, 298 Gough St., San Francisco. Open Sunday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m.–2:15 p.m. and 5 p.m.–8:15 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m.–2:15 p.m. and 5 p.m.–8:45 p.m.