Orlando may not have a Din Tai Fung (seriously, people, what’s the hold-up?) but we do have a reasonable facsimile called Zen Dumpling. Their DTF-style show window, behind which a quartet of dumpling virtuosos roll, fill and fold dough into pockets, is a sure sign they’re ready to fill the void. Lovers of soup dumplings, or xiaolongbao, happily wait for 45 minutes to an hour for the pleasure of experiencing Zen’s delicate, broth-filled pouches. And this being Waterford Lakes, there’s no shortage of places to bide one’s time — The Social House a few doors down from Zen was our waiting room of choice. Oddly enough, the sports bar was a lot more zen than the bustling dumpling house.
It seemed that every time I looked up, I saw bamboo steamers — the ones used as decorative embellishments inside Zen’s dining room, and the ones steadily brought out to tables, ours included. The signature “XLB Sampler” ($15.95) presented us with six soupy sacs inside a basket. No, they weren’t as perfectly uniform as DTF’s 18-fold, 21-gram beauties, but they’re attractive little purses nonetheless. Some are color-coded — truffle-pork is black, chicken is yellow — while the rest (pork, crab-pork, shrimp-pork and beef) aren’t. But pierce their wispy, papery-thin skins and they’ll burst with the brilliance of Zen’s chicken broth. Dip the dumpies in black vinegar and drape a few strands of julienned ginger on top of those dough twirls, and Bob’s your uncle.
The “Fanny’s your aunt” moment, however, was supplied by a beautiful bowl of sesame-flecked chili wontons ($9.95), followed by a plate of dan dan noodles ($11.95). The slippery squigglers arrived without the requisite minced pork and we didn’t miss it one bit — that’s how good this intense Sichuan classic was. And, really, so was pretty much everything else we had — wokky-slick Mongolian beef ($15.95) and its liberal use of onions; a spicy cucumber salad ($7.95) that, like the stir-fried green beans ($10.95), complemented everything. In the case of clumpy chicken fried rice ($13.95), those bold veggies made it so much better.
Even a couple of dishes that we’d likely pass on the next time weren’t really botched or blundered in any way — server-recommended sweet and sour baby ribs ($12.95) were just more sweet than sour, and the steamed chicken and mushroom dumplings ($10.50) required a slide across the reddened remnants in that empty plate of chili wontons.
BTW: Zen does a steady takeout business, but if you’re considering pickup or delivery and live more than 10 minutes away, you might want to consider, say, the superb pan-fried bao bites ($9.95) instead of soup dumplings, which tend to rapidly cool and degrade. Not that this PSA will dissuade the scores of soup dumpling fiends in this city from ordering them anyway.
Oh, and Zen plans to open a second location in Altamonte Springs this summer, spreading the gospel of xiaolongbao westward. To the uninitiated in Seminole County, take note: Zen Dumpling is sure to make a basket case out of you.
Zen Dumpling
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This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.