Tasty Dumplings

My colleagues & I had a great Binondo adventure last weekend.  We walked around Binondo, Manila & sampled every popular Chinese dish in the city.  It was munch munch day for us!  No diet for the day 😉

Our 1st stop was at Tasty Dumplings.  We ordered all their specialty dishes & we were all happy & ready for more!   I was quite surprised that a lot of them hadn’t yet tried Tasty Dumplings as I know they had a branch in Greenhills & Quezon City.  Originally in Manila, it’s best to sample the dishes in their maiden branch.

Here are the dishes we have sampled late morning that day:

• Dumplings (Php 70)

Since we wanted to try out everything, we opted to have the dumpling order with both fried & steamed.  Some of us wanted to be healthy & so just ended up sticking with the steamed version, while I just wanted to eat delicious food.  In my opinion, fried is still more yummy although it will have a bad effect on my health hehehe 😛  Tasty Dumplings is the name of the restaurant so it’s a given that their dumplings is the best in town.  And with any dumpling a most important part of such a dish is the actual filling itself.  If it ends up being too salty or lacking seasoning, then it ruins the entire dish.  But as always, Tasty Dumpling just seems to know their dumplings, and as usual, it was delicious!

• Hongma (Php 130)

Best-Seller for the day!  This is actually a dish that everyone just loved.  Not for the health conscious, but definitely a great dish.  It’s basically braised pork that is a combination of salty and sweet at the same time.  The best thing about eating braised pork like this is that it’s slowly cooked so the meat is tender, it absorbs a lot of the flavor of the sauce, and the sauce in turn gets that really defined pork taste.  The result is a good marriage of flavors.  I think they may have probably used a little soy sauce and maybe brown sugar for the added sweetness, but I’m not sure.  All I know is that everyone kept raving as to how delicious the dish was.

Of course, the fat in any meat dish gives it more taste, so just don’t expect “healthy” when you order this dish.  Just think DELICIOUS hahaha!

This dish can actually be eaten together with either rice, noodles or bread but I will insist you to eat it together with Tasty Dumplings’ Silver roll bread.

• Silver Roll Bread (Php 42)

I can safely say that this is fried bread.  I don’t know how they cooked it, but one word to describe this menu item is “PERFECT!”  The best thing about this bread is that fried taste you get with the crust, and that oh so soft middle that is just light and fluffy.  The sauce from the Hongma, the pork itself, coupled with this bread is a definite must-try combo.  You’ll never go wrong when you eat this with their “Hongma”.

• Pork Chop with Noodles (Php 99)

It’s ironic that even though the restaurant’s name is Tasty Dumplings, I always relate it with porkchop.  As I believe, their porkchop is the more popular dish in the place.  You can either order their porkchop as ala carte (Php 76) or with rice (Php 99).  We opted to order with noodles since we’re going to eat again in another place in like 10minutes after we leave hahaha!  Anyway, their porkchop is huge!  I think they sliced it very thinly in the middle then made it look like 1 giant piece of porkchop, the term is to butterfly a thick cut of the pork.  And actually this method is also good because you get more of the fried exterior which is always usually the best part of any pork chop.

And with Tasty Dumpling, that crispy, perfectly seasoned crust is really the reason why it’s just so good!  And to add to the perfection of it all, is that you can also choose to eat it with their special sauce (w/c coincidentally is used for their dumplings as well).

• Wintermelon Juice (Php 40)/Soya Milk (Php 28)

Tasty Dumplings not only serves good food but also good selection of drinks.  My favorite has always been wintermelon juice & soya milk.  Other restaurants do already serve wintermelon juice but it’s at Tasty dumplings that I had my 1st encounter with.  Their soya milk is served cold by the way.

With great company & great food, you’ll never go wrong.  The Hongma & Silver Roll Bread were our favorites.  We’ll definitely have our Ongpin trip repeat within the year.  Eating yummy & affordable food in the Manila streets is just fun, fun & fun!  And with Tasty Dumpling, it was definitely a great start to our Manila street food trip!

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Tasty Dumplings
620 Ongpin Street, Binondo, Manila, Philippines
(02) 242-5195