First impressions of Jin Jiao Gold Dumpling Bar – worth checking out if you’re in Tai Hang

New restaurants continue to open in Tai Hang, and the latest is Jin Jiao – Gold Dumpling Bar. Although the restaurant is on a corner and has signage on both sides, it’s easy to miss and we walked right past it.

The dumplings are worth checking out – home-made with a good variety of traditional fillings. It’s really an eat-and-go kind of place: diners sit on stools, which don’t encourage lingering. They don’t take bookings but if you eat earlier at lunch or dinner, you probably won’t have to wait.

The menu is straightforward: choose the dumpling fillings, decide on six or eight pieces, and how you want them cooked – boiled or fried.

The meal didn’t start off well when we tasted the beef, celery and cumin boiled dumplings (HK$42 for six). They were overcooked and we couldn’t  taste much cumin, although we liked the home-made feel. The boiled dumplings were garnished with chopped spring onions, but they would have been better without.

We enjoyed the vegetarian boiled dumplings (HK$42 for six), filled with chopped Chinese chives and black ear fungus. Three of the dumpling wrappers were green because they had been dyed with spinach, while the other three were red from beets, but we couldn’t detect the taste of either.

Tomato and egg is a typical homestyle Chinese dish, and at Jin Jiao it is used as a dumpling filling together with corn kernels (HK$52 for six). We had these fried, and they were on the bland side. A small cup of corn in a thin cream sauce was served with the dumplings, but we were told it wasn’t meant to be used as a dip.

We were surprised that this place doesn’t offer a plate of vegetables to go with the dumplings, although snacks are available. We ordered the finger spring rolls (HK$38 for three), which were fried and piping hot, but they didn’t have much filling.