The Worst Restaurant in New York

And America. And The World.

Last night, I ate at a new restaurant for the first time. I was out with a friend in the East Village and we passed Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. He had seen on Tik Tok that it just opened this week.

The experience was a perversion of food, an affront to taste, and an insult to my personhood. I can say, without hesitation, that Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is the worst restaurant in New York City. 

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is in Manhattan. It is not in Brooklyn. There are no locations in Brooklyn. Its sister restaurant, Brooklyn Chop House, is also in Manhattan. Perhaps in Tokyo in 2013 calling something “Brooklyn” made it cool. But Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is ten minutes from Brooklyn. You can just go to the real place (where there are plenty of dumpling shops.)

The decor is a mish-mash of every mid-2010s design trope: a meaningless phrase rendered in neon; old-timey serif “Brooklyn” fonts; Ikea-modern woodtones. It’s sleek, bare, “luxury” condo-chic. There’s a Bitcoin ATM, because why not? If you’re marketing to tasteless social media addicts with a desperate need to fit in, you might as well accept their currency of choice. They sell bucket hats. If they had a Brooklyn Pavilion at Epcot, it would be this. 

The centerpiece of Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is the automat: a vending machine-type system where you pick up your food from a numbered box. The place is marketed on Instagram with a promise of  “ZERO HUMAN INTERACTION,” caps lock their own. You order on your phone or from a touch screen, then receive your food from your automat compartment. During my visit, an employee came out repeatedly to tell each customer their food was ready. Every single person got their food, sequentially, from Box #17. It was both not how an automat works and the very definition of “human interaction.”

Here is the dumpling menu, presented unabridged: 

• Pastrami

• The Reuben

• Philly Cheesesteak

• Lamb Gyro Tzatiki

• Salami Provolone

• Turkey Club

• Chicken Satay w Our Famous Peanut Sauce Dip

• Peanut Butter & Jelly

• Chicken Parm

• Pork [Chazzy’s Note: Having one normal flavor is somehow even worse]

• 3 Blend Burger

• Bacon “Pepperjack” Cheeseburger, Onions, Mushrooms

• Prosciutto & Swiss

• Hot Italian Salami

• Short Rib Stacked

• Chicken, Ginger

• Pepperoni Pizza

• Spanakopita, Spinach, & Feta

Mouthwatering, right? And that doesn’t even include the “Breakfast Cro’sumplings” or the soup dumplings, which come in French Onion, Matzo Ball, and Cream of Mushroom. There’s also Red Velvet Frosé. Swag. 

I ordered the pastrami dumplings. When my ancestors try to beat my ass in the afterlife for doing that to our culture, I will tell them I had no choice, because almost everything was out of stock. I guess the “Hot Italian Salami” dumpling is a big mover. The dumplings start at $5.99, which actually isn’t so bad for six dumplings. Except they come in orders of three, so the prices are horrendous. The Alaskan King Crab Soup Dumplings, available for $19.99, would be a good option if you are going to prison for financial crimes and want to dump cash before it is seized by the feds. The dumplings are served in a hot plastic bag, as if to remind you one more time that they were pre-frozen and prepared robotically. I suppose it is more Instagrammable to eat like you are on the Wall-E spaceship or babysitting for a child with an Easy-Bake Oven. 

And, well? How did they taste? 

You guessed it! They sucked shit. Absolutely terrible. The dumplings were hard and burnt. I literally only know how to cook eggs, mac ‘n’ cheese, and frozen dumplings, and my dumplings are better than this. The dough was chewy and stale. The meat was salty with a pink slime mouthfeel. There was no pastrami seasoning at all; I genuinely think they got pastrami and corned beef mixed up, or just never looked up the difference. The mustard tasted fine, but came in a packet which was inexplicably scorching hot, so they somehow fucked that up too. A woman walked by us while we ate and asked how it was. My unthinking, instinctive response was: “horrendous.” 

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is headed by serial restaurateur Stratis Morfogen. His last venture, Brooklyn Chop House, was “the first dim sum to chops type of steak house,” where he began perverting dumplings into sick and twisted forms. Jonathan Cheban once visited Brooklyn Chop House, where he tasted the French Onion Soup Dumplings, declared them “sweet” and “watery,” then gave them a 9.1. Morfogen also published a dumpling cookbook, which I am launching a Tipper Gore-style crusade to ban. 

You might be wondering why Morfogen is opening a concept built around avoiding human interaction just as the pandemic ends and people crave human interaction. He tells you himself in this interview: the automat, the touch-screen ordering, and assembly-line kitchen all help with social distancing. But what they’re really good at is reducing payroll expenses. Morfogen says that with his innovations in cost-cutting, the restaurant industry will go from 7-in-10 failures to 7-in-10 successes. And that’s the essence of it all. To Morfogen, restaurants fail because they have to pay too many workers too much. Not because they’re selling shitty food or have passé, nonsensical branding or develop a menu that makes you throw up in your mouth or open restaurants that are transparent, soulless money grabs that belittle the customers’ intelligence and desecrate the very idea of good food. No, it’s because of those pesky workers.

While we were focused on Covid-19, the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop pandemic was spreading around the globe. Morfogen sold 139 franchises before the first store even opened, with locations around the Tri-State, Europe, the Caribbean, and Singapore. Don’t worry: I’ve already contacted the SEC. There’s no way that happened without some sort of fraud.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because it’s the worst manifestation of Insider-video-Spoon-University-Snapchat-travel-show-Facebook-content-farm-phone-eats-first culture, where food is meant to be viewed, not eaten. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because it thinks Brooklyn is an amusement park which can be wrapped up in dough and sold to tourists and transplants in a gift shop. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because the owner is the worst type of greedy, fake-innovating, self-obsessed publicity whore start-up bro the likes of Andrew Yang would gladly fill our city with. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because they’re selling pastrami dumplings when you can barely get good pastrami in Manhattan anymore. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because in a year where real restaurants struggled to survive and workers were laid off by the millions, they’re building a business around hiring less people and not having to talk to them. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because Asian people suffered a wave of prejudice and hate crimes and countless Asian businesses closed, and they’re selling fucking turkey club dumplings. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because it costs too much. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop sucks because the food sucks.

Zero stars.