Panda Fest is coming back to downtown Dallas, so go hungry and wear comfortable shoes.
The traveling Asian food and culture festival made its Dallas debut at Carpenter Park last November, and it returns to the same spot, 2201 Pacific Ave., Nov. 6 through 8. This year’s lineup has more than 60 food vendors serving upward of 150 dishes, plus more than 20 merchandise vendors and a schedule of live cultural performances that includes kung fu shows.
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Wu Wei Din Chinese Cuisine started in a tiny Plano storefront around 2016, opened by Taiwan native Todd Hung with a singular focus: bring the wontons, noodles, and dumplings of his home island to North Texas the way they’re actually made there, not the Americanized version most diners had come to expect from Chinese food in the suburbs.
It worked well enough that the original location outgrew itself. Wu Wei Din has since expanded to Lewisville, with a Fort Worth location set to open in July 2026, evidence that Hung’s bet on serving genuinely authentic Taiwanese and Shanghainese cooking paid off far beyond that first small dining room.
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Suite 105 at 1901 Royal Lane in Northwest Dallas looks like exactly what it is — a small storefront in a strip center near I-35, a few doors down from a jiu-jitsu studio, nothing on the outside to slow you down. Which is probably why most people drive past Hong Dumpling House without knowing it exists, and why the people who have found it would rather keep it that way.
KP Hong makes Korean mandu — handmade dumplings, six to an order, made when you order them. Not sitting in a warmer. Not pre-made and reheated. Call ahead if you can, because the kitchen is one person and the wait is real. The reward for waiting is a dumpling with a wrapper that has actual texture — thin, slightly chewy, the way it should be when the dough hasn’t been sitting around long enough to toughen or steam into mush.
The filling is packed in generously, which matters because the ratio of wrapper to filling is the difference between a good dumpling and a forgettable one.
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Hao Tran did not arrive in the food world through a culinary school or a restaurant kitchen. She came through grief and an empty house and a therapist who wasn’t helping. After her daughters left for college, she took the money she had been spending on therapy and spent it on food instead — specifically on the dishes she grew up eating, the ones her grandmother and aunt had made, the ones she had been carrying around in her memory for years without anywhere to put them.
She started making dumplings. Then she started showing up at pop-ups. Then she did another. And another. Three hundred and fifty of them over two years, schlepping equipment out of her car across North Texas, building a following one bowl at a time, all while teaching high school chemistry by day and running her own kitchen by night.
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If you’ve spent any time eating in New York’s East Village, you probably know Mimi Cheng’s. If you haven’t, June 7 is a reasonable introduction.
The dumpling shop at 179 Second Avenue has been one of those quietly essential New York addresses since sisters Hannah and Marian Cheng opened it in 2014. Hannah left a Wall Street career to do it. The idea was simple: their mother Mimi made Taiwanese-style dumplings at home, the sisters couldn’t find anything close to them in the city, so they started making their own. Pasture-raised pork, family-raised chicken, farm vegetables, wrappers spread thin and folded by hand. Whole Foods just named the brand one of its top food trends for 2026. It has that kind of following.
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A new Chinese restaurant opened on Preston Road in March and it’s already one of the more interesting things to happen to North Dallas dining in a while. It’s called Uptown Dumpling, and the chef running the kitchen — Hao Wenjie — has cooked at a level most people in this city have never encountered.
Chef Hao is a UNESCO Ambassador of Intangible Culinary Heritage. He personally led three China Day banquets at UN Headquarters in New York, events the Los Angeles Times once called an edible cultural white paper. He was part of the founding team behind the Michelin Guide’s launch in Beijing and holds accreditation as a judge with the World Association of Chefs Societies. He ended up at 18101 Preston Rd., Suite 204c, in a strip mall space that used to be Tian Tian. Dallas does things like that.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Fort Worth has been waiting on this one for a while. Hao Tran — the chef behind Hao’s Grocery & Café on the Near Southside and the closest thing Fort Worth has to a dumpling institution — is building her first full restaurant. It’s called Duong DeVille, and if the five-month construction timeline holds, it should open sometime this summer.
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Bushi Bushi Dim Sum in Addison is a dim sum experience that turns every bite into a moment of discovery. The restaurant’s strength lies in the meticulous care taken with each dish, making even familiar items feel extraordinary. The soup dumplings set the stage: delicate, translucent skins envelop a steaming pork broth that bursts on the tongue, rich and savory with just a whisper of ginger. Each dumpling is perfectly pleated, tender but resilient enough to cradle the hot filling until the very first bite. Shumai follows with plump morsels of pork and shrimp, lightly seasoned with sesame oil and a touch of ginger, their springy texture and golden tops inviting repeated bites.
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