Laoban Dumplings

I had been looking forward to going to this restaurant for a date night after seeing articles about great dumplings. However, when I showed up I did not know the restaurant was in a college cafeteria. Also, the dumplings were not made fresh. They came out in seconds and tasted microwaved. I will never go here again and wish I'd never wasted my time. I've had better dumplings at nearly any chinese food place. Average, at best. But because of the hype? Hugely disappointing.

I was excited to try this place because it has 5 stars but it was... not good. We got the chicken dumplings with sesame sauce. The sauce just tasted like bitter soy sauce and the dumplings (at $8/6 small dumplings) didn’t taste great. They were seasoned oddly and tasted like they came out of a microwave, even though they took 15 min to make. It was disappointing.

This place has a few seats but mostly seems to serve dumplings, baos, and a few cold salad/noodle dishes to go. They were fast and polite (they even had to make more bao buns to fill my order and were super quick about it). The pork baos are delicious, the beef were kind of flavorless. The mushroom bao is quite good if you really love mushrooms. The dumplings overall were a big tough; the skin was too thick which made them seem undercooked or not fresh. They were fresh, however; I saw them come out of the steam basket. The pork and chicken dumplings are both tasty and filling, the veggie dumplings taste pretty much what you'd think a veggie dumpling would taste like. Not a bad place, given the other mostly terrible options in the neighborhood, but room for improvement.

nothing special. their dumplings weren't necessarily bad, but they were very very very plain. even their sauces were plain. one is just soy sauce with sesame oil and the other one is a bit spicier. and they only have 2 kinds of dumplings.. not worth it imo. also, they didn't open until past 12:30pm even though their hours said they open at 11am on Saturday.