Okay, this one is for the people who will happily drive 40 minutes for a good dumpling. You know who you are. I am absolutely one of you.
Nan Xiang Soup Dumplings has landed in Westchester. The address is 27 Mamaroneck Avenue, Suite 2, in downtown White Plains, and it is the brand's first location in the county. The doors opened Friday, July 24, inside a 6,500 square foot, 193 seat space done up in black, red and gold with traditional Chinese details.
Here Is Why That Is a Big Deal
Nan Xiang opened its first restaurant in Flushing in 2006, back when xiao long bao was not something most New Yorkers could pronounce, let alone order. It got recommended by the Michelin Guide for nine consecutive years straight. Two decades later there are Nan Xiang dining rooms across seven states, from Connecticut down to Georgia. Thirteen locations total, including one in Stamford. Every single one still traces back to that one Shanghainese shop in Queens.
The Name Is Not Marketing. It Is a Place.
This is the part that genuinely stopped me. Nan Xiang is not an invented brand name. Nanxiang is a real, ancient town in the Jiading District of Shanghai, and it is where the soup dumpling was created in the late 1800s. The story usually credited is a teahouse owner named Huang Mingxian, who had the idea of setting meat in a jellied stock so it would melt into actual soup once the dumpling steamed. Everything you have ever eaten out of a bamboo basket runs back through that town. So the sign over the door in White Plains is basically a birth certificate.
Everything Is Still Folded by Hand
Dough, filling, pleat, repeat, all morning long. Tradition calls for a specific number of folds around the top of each dumpling: eighteen, the same count that made Din Tai Fung famous. The wrappers are pleated by hand. The dumplings are steamed to order. It happens in an open kitchen, so you can sit at your table and watch your dinner get built in front of you. Honestly the best kind of dinner theater, and nobody asks you to clap.
If you cannot make a decision under pressure, and I cannot, the Lucky Six is the move. Six soup dumplings, six different fillings, one basket, naturally colored wrappers so you can tell them apart. Pork, crab and pork, chicken, pork and truffle, luffa shrimp and pork, and scallop and pork.
It Is Not Only the Dumplings
The menu goes well past the steamers. Pan fried pork buns, handmade noodles, wok fired rice, Shanghainese stir fries, wontons in spicy peanut sauce. And the breakfast menu runs all day, which is a genuinely underrated life choice. Fried dough with warm soybean milk, scallion pancakes, savory tofu pudding, Northern style pastries. There is a full bar too, which not every location has.
Why This Matters for Westchester
We talk a lot about people driving into Queens or Manhattan for the food they cannot get up here. This is one of those trips getting shorter. A place with a real 20 year reputation looked at downtown White Plains and decided it made sense. That says something good about where Mamaroneck Avenue is heading.
All the photos in this piece are Nan Xiang's own, from their Instagram at @nanxiangsoupdumplings. Thanks to them for documenting their own kitchen so well.
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