Soup Dumplings the Size of Your Face Are the Latest NYC Food Craze

Thrillist

If you’re looking for a reason to waste part of your day, there’s a brand-new, nearly impossible-to-get, somewhat-difficult-to-eat dish for you to attempt to order/brag to your friends about trying!

Qihui Guan (previously of Joe’s Shanghai) and her son, Yuan Lee, are the team behind the East Village’s brand-new Drunken Dumpling, which is responsible for the latest food craze that’ll make you want to delete Instagram off your phone: XL-sized Xiao Long Bao (or “XL XLBs”), aka giant soup dumplings. The $11.75 dumplings, which, by our very rough visual estimate, appear to be six times the size of traditional soup dumplings, are filled with homemade chicken broth, shrimp, and seaweed, and arrive in a steam basket (which they nearly fill). They’re served with multiple straws because 1) this is probably going to be a team effort, and 2) there’s literally no other way to consume them other than to puncture the top with a straw and sip the soup through it. No word from Adrian Grenier on how he feels about this egregious straw usage.

So, are these XL soup dumplings any good? Let us know if you actually get to try them. A woman who arrived to the tiny storefront before us, at 12:09pm, said they were sold out when she got there. According to Drunken Dumpling’s Facebook page, they’re only making 25 per day. For what it’s worth, the cashier recommends getting there at around 11:30am, and really, is there any better awkward late breakfast/early lunch than some hot broth!? On the off chance that you’re coming here for a regular-sized dumpling like a fool, Drunken Dumpling also offers normal soup dumplings in both pork and crab varieties.

One very important question remains, though: what do you do with all that leftover dumpling skin once you’ve had all the soup?! Should we start a campaign to save the leftover dumpling skin and #enddumplingskinwaste?

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Lucy Meilus is Thrillist's New York Editor and is ambivalent about straws. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram