Dim Sum Go Go – the Chinatown dumpling house that ditched the trolley

On East Broadway, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, Dim Sum Go Go has filled its dining room with made-to-order dumplings since 2000. When it opened, the restaurant made headlines in Chinatown for breaking with a decades-old ritual: dim sum would not be wheeled past on trolleys, but ordered fresh from a menu and cooked to order. Owner Veronica Leung, who grew up in a restaurant family between Shanghai and New York, built the kitchen's repertoire around her mother's cooking, and enlisted her friend, the New York Times food writer Colette Rossant, to help shape the room's look. A quarter of a century on, the formula still holds: a long, photo-led menu of dumplings, rice rolls and buns, ordered quickly and arriving hot rather than lukewarm from a cart. The MICHELIN Guide awards Dim Sum Go Go a Bib Gourmand, its distinction for a good meal at a moderate price, and it remains one of the Chinatown kitchens inspectors return to year after year.

01The room and the setting

The dining room runs over two floors, bright and contemporary rather than styled after the red-lacquer banquet halls nearby. Leung and Rossant gave the space a French-leaning, modern decor set against illustrations drawn in a traditional Chinese style, a combination that reads closer to a downtown café than a dim sum hall. There are no trolleys to dodge between tables: service is brisk, seating turns over fast at lunch, and the room fills with the clatter of bamboo steamers rather than the squeak of cart wheels.

02The people behind it

Dim Sum Go Go's founding story is unusually layered for Chinatown. Veronica Leung opened the restaurant inspired by her mother's cooking, bringing in a Hong Kong-trained chef early on to translate home-style Cantonese dishes for a New York dining room, while Rossant's design eye gave the space its uncommon look. For years the kitchen ran as a tight four-person team, and it was among the first dim sum restaurants in the city to offer delivery, a decision that has paid off through two decades of changing Chinatown economics.

Insider tip

Open daily 11am–9pm; reservations taken directly; near the East Broadway F train station.

03The cooking

The kitchen's point of difference is speed without the compromise of a steam table: orders go straight to the wok or the bamboo steamer rather than sitting on a cart for twenty minutes. The broad, photo-driven menu makes ordering simple, and the standouts tend to be the rice rolls with roast duck and scallion, crisp-bottomed pan-fried pork dumplings and the soup dumplings. A few dumplings arrive dyed red or green, coloured with beet and spinach juice rather than food dye, a small, deliberate flourish on an otherwise classic Cantonese repertoire.

04What to order

Start with the Go Go Seafood Fried Rice, built on diced shrimp, scallops and king crab meat finished with XO sauce and dried scallops, before moving to the Roast Duck Dumplings, the kitchen's signature, filled with roast duck, carrot, wood ear mushroom and mustard greens in a wheat-flour wrapper. The Shrimp Rice Rolls and the Rice Rolls with Roast Duck and Scallion both come as steamed rice noodle rolls with a housemade sweet soy sauce, and a vegetarian version is filled with carrot, celery, snow ear, wood ear and enoki mushroom. Don't skip the Shrimp & Mango Rolls, mango wrapped in shrimp paste and rice paper; it is reportedly the only dumpling of its kind made in Chinatown. For a wider taste, the Seafood/Meat Dim Sum Platter brings ten different handmade dumplings on one plate, from shrimp dumpling and shui mai to curry beef and chive & shrimp dumpling, while the Turnip Cake, pan-fried with ham and Chinese mushroom, and the tobiko-topped Shui Mai are reliable everyday orders.

05When to go and booking

Dim Sum Go Go is open daily from 11am to 9pm for dine-in, delivery and takeout, with catering and private events available for larger groups. The restaurant takes reservations directly, useful at weekend lunch when Chinatown's dim sum houses fill fastest.

06The neighbourhood

East Broadway begins at Chatham Square, also known as Kimlau Square, and runs east under the Manhattan Bridge through Chinatown and the Two Bridges area, with Dim Sum Go Go sitting right at that bridge-shadowed stretch. The street's western end overlaps with Little Fuzhou, the enclave built up since the 1980s by immigrants from Fujian province, giving this corner of Chinatown a different rhythm from the Cantonese core around Mott and Pell Streets. The nearest subway access is the F train at the East Broadway station, a short walk from the restaurant's door.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.