Dumpling Library,
St Anne's Square,
Belfast,
BT1 2LR.
028 9691 9222
dumplinglibrary.co.uk
CRUNCH. Do you hear that? Crunch. The unmistakable always appetising sound of, well, anything.
The appeal of food with volume is many-fold. Most of it is buried deep in our evolutionary make-up, whether it was way back before even fire was around and all our earliest ancestors had to keep them going was a handful of insects or the like, or more recently when they discovered that bright, hot stuff made that hunk of animal flesh particularly tasty.
There's the association we make between crispness and freshness, which may veer into notions of nutrition, but probably stops short of a tube of sour cream and onion Pringles.
Whatever the reasons, we're wired to love it. Those wires carry what we're feeling in our mouths through the bones in our head to the ears. The brain gets passed on the message and counts the pules of sound. The more, the better, the crispier.
How that sound is received has an effect too. Stick on some earphones and a song with the right amount of bass and munch away. Best bag of crisps you've ever had.
Someone else far cleverer than me also managed to come up with a definitional difference between 'crunchy' and 'crispy' which is a lot more involved than "Crispy Nut Cornflakes would sound stupid".
But, for our purposes, they're interchangeable. 'Crispy', 'crunchy', 'crackly', whatever – it's all good, and the Dumpling Library in Belfast city centre – the latest venture of restaurateur Eddie Fung – brings the crunch and turns up the volume.
The offering is broadly called 'Asian tapas', which accurately enough covers the vast menu of mostly small plates from across the continent, with styles and flavours mixing happily along the way.
We ask how many dishes would be best to order. Three, probably. Four if you're really hungry. In an attempt to be as comprehensively professional as possible – reader, you're welcome – that sage advice is ignored and the table, plus a bit of the empty one next door, is covered in really good stuff, which still barely scratches the surface of what's on offer.
The eponymous dumplings happen to be at the other end of the crispness scale, though you can get them fried rather than steamed if you want. The rainbow effect of the dough is a little dulled by the steamer, but it's what's inside that counts, with a prawn and a courgette and egg filling the best of a uniformly excellent selection.
But it's elsewhere the crunch is brought, relentlessly and joyously. Taiwanese fried chicken is gently warming with spice but flawlessly balanced in texture with the still juicy meat enveloped in perfectly brittle coating.
The batter of the soft shell crab is similarly fragile but substantially satisfying, with the salad of lamb's lettuce, peanuts, sweet lychee and tart pomelo almost stealing the show.
The gently sour, refreshing seaweed salad flies the flag for healthy crunch, but it's the deep fat fryer that's really churning out the little miracles here, headlined by cubes of aubergine, whose sharp-edged exterior gives way to an almost liquid inside. All in an umami packed yellow bean sauce, they are a marvel.
Everything those boffins were saying about hunter-gatherers or eating a bag of Tayto while listening to Massive Attack all boils down to these bits of deep fried veg. Pure pleasure.
Dessert occupies a postage stamp in the corner of the menu with a perfectly serviceable piece of chocolate fudge cake and their signature – ice cream, mango, pomelo, strawberries, pearls of sago and meringue – a nice enough bowl of mostly sweet things paling in comparison to what's gone before.
The bill can mount simply because it's difficult to know when to stop. The lunchtime offer of four of the small plates for £21 is stand-out value for this sort of quality. The best solution may simply be to come back.
The space is a curious but not unpleasant mix of striking murals, filament lightbulbs and shrubbery hanging from every surface.
Outside, there are dining pods for anyone who'd rather stay away from the bustle, though where you'll put the crunchy stuff you can't fit on your own table is something you will absolutely have to consider.
THE BILL
Rainbow dumpling platter £11.80
Taiwanese fried chicken £6.80
Soft shell crab £7.20
Aubergine in yellow bean sauce £6.20
Green salad £6.20
Duck fried rice £10.80
Miss Saigon dessert £6.20
Chocolate fudge cake £6.20
Vietnamese coffee cocktail £8.85
Mojito £8.85
Kowloon Fizz £5.55
Total £84.65
