• Biang!

  41-10 Main St., Flushing; 718-888-7713

  You know those pretty good five-for-a-dollar pork-and-chive dumplings? These aren’t those. These are better. These are six-for-a-fiver, cooked-to-order lamb dumplings, and they’re worth the splurge. (When, by the way, was the last time you found a Chinese restaurant that stuffed its dumplings with lamb?) Like chef David Shi’s spectacular hand-pulled noodles, his dumplings have the same tender-chewy bite you associate with pasta produced by culinarily elite Italian grandmas. They’re shaped like Little House on the Prairie bonnets and come two ways: in an invigorating sour broth that could clear a sinus at twenty paces, or sluiced with the house signature sauce (a soy-rice-vinegar-and-chile-oil-based concoction so good you could slop it over an old sneaker and serve it on a bed of watercress to rave reviews). Get them both, one after the other, and you’re pretty much in dumpling heaven.

From the 2013 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine