The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index

Where can one find the world’s fourth-best xiaolongbao: in the city named Shanghai or at the restaurant named Shanghai? And does it really matter?

- Joe Dunthorne

Before I moved to Shanghai, I spent a lot of time in Shanghai, a restaurant in east London. My favourite dish was the gooey, soup-filled dumplings, which looked like popped-out eyeballs. The first time I tried to eat one, I spilled a slick of hot gravy down my shirt, the liquid so fatty it made the fabric transparent, my nipple suddenly visible in the middle of the restaurant.

Then I arrived in Shanghai for a two-month writing residency. The first thing I did was search “best dumplings in Shanghai” and discovered a document called The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index. It “applies a quantitative framework to the existing qualitative descriptors” of the city’s most beloved dish, the xiaolongbao. The author— an American named Christopher St Cavish—took scales, scissors and Japanese digital callipers to more than 50 restaurants and, according to his findings, the fourth-best soup dumplings in the whole city, and therefore, probably, fourth best in the world, were in a bland mall’s basement food court 50m from the door to my apartment. At the time, this seemed like good news.

I learned that, if I got lucky with the elevator, I could get from my desk in my room on the 19th floor to the xiaolongbao counter in less than a minute. It took perhaps 30 seconds for the owner to take my money and my order: middle picture, set menu three. Then five minutes to cook, half a minute to cool. So seven minutes from the thought—“I would like to eat the fourth-best soup dumpling in the world”—to feeling it implode on my tongue.