“I’m a crazy, ridiculous hedonist. I like to dodge responsibility and I like intoxicants,” said Glynn Washington, host of KQED’s “Snap Judgment” podcast, before taking a swig of beer at Oakland’s Shan Dong Restaurant. The Chinatown gem of 32 years is where Washington does some of his best dumpling eating, and we’re here for the restaurant’s legendary pork-and-leek ones.

Washington’s statement about responsibility is not true, by the way. He successfully helms “Snap” and its supernatural-leaning sister podcast, “Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked,” to the tune of up to 4 million downloads per month across platforms. If that’s dodging responsibility, sign me up. Both shows include absorbing tales from Washington’s own life during each episode introduction, which is how I learned that Washington lives in Oakland and loves dumplings, a perfect opportunity for this superfan to invite him to The Dumpling Report’s first foray into the East Bay. 

Over a feast at Shan Dong — his choice — I would come to learn more about Washington: He was a one-time candidate for Oakland mayor in 2005 and counts Ira Glass of “This American Life” among his mentors.

Despite opening in 1991, Shan Dong has the look and feel of a restaurant that’s much older. There are the bright yellow square tables and round, pressed-particle wooden ones topped with Lazy Susans. It has utilitarian gray walls lined with framed Chinese calligraphy and beige-tiled floors reminiscent of no-frills Chinese American restaurants of the mid-20th century.

Shan Dong advertises itself as a Mandarin restaurant, but it’s a vague descriptor leftover from the early days. “We don’t really focus on one region,” owner Charles Hung told SFGATE. While his father did indeed hail from China’s eastern province of Shandong, the restaurant offers a range of food, from boiled dumplings based on his father’s recipes to Cantonese American favorites like beef and tomato chow mein, to inventions created on-premises, like its famous hand-cut sesame paste noodles.

To fuel the demanding workload of the “Snap” empire, Washington has often turned to Shan Dong, which is located down the street from the studio’s former headquarters. “I’ve eaten here like a million times,” he said on a bustling Wednesday night, as we ordered from the menu. 

Originally from Detroit, Washington grew up in rural Michigan as part of an apocalyptic religious cult called Worldwide Church of God (now Grace Communion International). With his background, it comes as no surprise that he created a podcast series about the Heaven’s Gate cult, which later inspired an HBO show. But the original “Snap Judgment” podcast began in 2010 — the result of a public radio contest that Washington won.

“I was just throwing darts at the board,” he said of his almost chronic status of being a creative contest entrant — podcasts, screenwriting, novels, music, you name it. “Snap” stood out with its tagline of “Storytelling, with a BEAT.” It focuses on first-person accounts where one decision changed each storyteller’s life, along with a catchy original score for emotional effect.

The story of Hung’s involvement in Shan Dong certainly qualifies as a life-changing decision. At 55, he is the second generation of his family to run Shan Dong. He’s a restaurant kid who was so committed to helping his parents that he dropped out of City College of San Francisco a few months after the restaurant opened for what he thought was a temporary stint, but he never looked back. 

“I’ve been stuck here ever since,” he said via phone on a Monday afternoon — his only day off from 12-hour workdays the rest of the week. Hung’s father, Brang, passed away in 2014, and Hung’s mother, Helen, recently retired. They fled from mainland China to Taiwan under the communist regime, and that’s where Brang worked as a professor and where Hung was born. In 1982, the family immigrated to the states, where Brang’s credentials didn’t transfer, and he started his American life as a dishwasher. 

Today, Hung’s college sweetheart-turned-wife Tiffany Yu, and brother-in-law Chi Hung Li, help run the restaurant. He has never wanted his two grown children to work in the grueling restaurant business — “When my family moved to the U.S., we had no choice” — but he himself is still committed to running Shan Dong.

The restaurant’s dumplings started with his father Brang’s recipes, including the popular pork-and-leek. When they arrive, steaming hot pillows of dough the size of tangerines give way to a thick, soft bite that reveals a juicy, porky center well balanced by punchy ginger and mildly sweet, bright green leeks. The dumpling dough has evolved over the years, though. 

“Customers from China say it’s too doughy. Honestly — I know,” said Hung with the annoyed-yet-amused tone of a restaurant veteran. “The volume is so high for dumplings, we have to make them fresh and freeze them [for storage]. So the dough has to be a little bit thicker,” said Hung. Thinner dough will break in the freezer. 

Shan Dong only keeps the dumplings frozen for one to two days, since turnover is so high: The restaurant serves 1,500 to 2,000 dumplings a day, with one or two dedicated staff members boiling batches of 50 dumplings at a time from the minute the restaurant opens. One would be hard-pressed to notice any difference in dumpling freshness.

Aside from the logistical reasons for the thicker dumpling dough, the doughiness has become a source of comfort for many loyal regulars. “After I changed the dough to not as thick, customers were telling me, ‘I miss the dough from before,’” said Hung. The thickness is not wildly out of proportion — think of it as an extra layer of dumpling warmth, especially nice in rainy or cold weather. The menu — almost a novella of items — also treated us to hefty chicken dumplings, savory combination fried rice, crispy onion pancake, nostril-clearing salt-and-pepper fish, wok-crisp dry-braised string beans, velvety scallion lamb and those famous sesame paste noodles (you must order the hand-cut version). Nutty, creamy, thick and chewy — it’s hard to believe they have only been on the menu since about 2005. The dish feels like a classic.

“To be honest, it was really an accident,” Hung said of creating the dish. “I got to the point where I really didn’t know what to eat anymore.” First came the hand-cut noodles, born of the staff thinking up ways to use leftover dumpling dough, made of a simple mixture of flour and water, and “just doing it our own way.” Then, one day, “I cooked a sesame sauce. Back then, it was strange,” Hung said of a time that preceded now-standard grocery items like instant noodles with sesame sauce. Perfecting proportions of sesame oil, soy sauce and sugar, Shan Dong’s chefs created a signature dish that seems like it always existed — and can never be frozen, unlike the dumplings. 

Instead, the noodle chefs are in the front of the house, constantly working behind a glass window by the entrance. 

“Food is made out of stories, and the way you learn about somebody is through their stories and what they eat,” said Washington during our dinner. This sentiment runs through the story of Shan Dong’s food and the Hung family, following an evolution of food and innovative recipes made for survival in a new homeland.

Shan Dong Restaurant, 328 10th St., Oakland. Open Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 4 p.m.-9 p.m, Friday & Saturday, 11 a.m-3 p.m. and 4 p.m.-9:30 p.m.