In gastronomic terms, I led a deprived childhood. Out of respect for my dear departed mum, I will not go into grisly detail, but it is fair to say that she was an inheritor of the traditions of great British cuisine before there was such a thing as great British cuisine. So I grew up thinking that a dumpling was a ball of flour and suet, boiled in the stew for the last few minutes of cooking.
The explosion of cheap Chinese restaurants in the past 20 years has redefined the dumpling for me and other Auckland diners, but it is not an exclusively Chinese specialty. I've eaten them in Mongolia (where they're called buuz and are just about the only edible item); I've enjoyed sweet kozhukkattai (with coconut and jaggery) in South India and kachoris in Delhi and samosas pretty much everywhere. The Turks use ground lamb in their manti (which may be a legacy of Genghis Khan's hordes), the Georgians make khinkali and the Poles pierogi, which I tried in a restaurant in Queens where hormone-loaded chickens with breasts like Gina Lollobrigida's revolved on the rotisserie. The less said about German dumplings the better, but you may have heard of ravioli and tortellini.
I'm picking that there is no dish more extensively consumed (check out Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean), yet when someone says "let's go out for dumplings", I expect I'm getting Chinese food - and I'm hoping it will be at Mr Zhou's.
I first came across his eponymous dumpling shop in New Lynn, but barely a month ago a new branch opened in Mt Eden Rd, a few doors south of Wild Wheat, after complaints from loyal regulars that it was too far to travel to get their fix of his dumplings, which are the best I've tasted anywhere.
Mr Zhou (actually Zhou Bin) and his wife, Jing Huifang, are hands-on operators at the two places - he's at the original and she's in charge at the new place - turning out, with the help of two employees, at least 30,000 dumplings a week. (Incredulous, I did the maths; it would be almost 200 an hour each if they worked only 40 hours but they don't - they work more like 80 and Bin told me through an interpreter that he dreams dumplings and sometimes crimps his wife's nose in her sleep).
