London’s Preeminent Shengjianbao Specialist Arrives on the Isle of Dogs This Month

Wildly popular and essential London street food stall, Dumpling Shack will join forces with its sister brand Fen Noodles for a new takeaway restaurant site on the Isle of Dogs in east London later this month.

Owners John and Yee Li will take over a kitchen and counter space at The Collective, a co-living space in Canary Wharf. John told Eater that the plan is to focus initially on collection and a delivery service for the residents of the Isle of Dogs. “We figured many people are still working from home and will be for the foreseeable future so that’s why we opted for a location which is heavily populated with residential as opposed to office space,” he said.

The menu will feature a combination of dishes from the two street food stalls which sit side-by-side in Spitalfields Market’s The Kitchens: hand pulled belt noodles, by Fen’s Nelson Chan, plus wontons, shengjianbaos, and more of Li’s Shanghainese, Sichuanese, and Cantonese dishes. “We’re also adding rice bowls — pork belly and spicy beef — and looking to work with [pastry chef Terri Mercieca’s award-winning] Happy Endings to do an exclusive soft serve ice cream. On the weekends we’ll be doing our Sichuan hot fried chicken sandwich,” John said.

He added that after a difficult lockdown period this would hopefully be the beginning of the expansion the two brands have been working towards — a journey which began six years ago when Dumpling Shack first opened on a market stall near Broadway Market in east London.

“If we can get this running smoothly the next step will be to bring it home and open an arch location by London Fields where we can focus on producing a frozen dumpling range,” John said. “We want to expand, and we can but we need to do it sensibly and not diminish the quality that we’ve worked so fucking hard to get to over these past years.”