Sometimes the most comforting food comes in the form of a bowl of spicy noodles and a basket of soup dumplings—that blissful Shanghainese invention in which hot broth is somehow pocketed inside steamed dumplings.
In a perfect world, Chinese dumpling shops would be on every street corner in Baltimore. But lucky for us all, Yu Noodles, a Chongqing noodle and dumpling house, opened on York Road, just south of the county line, about six months ago.
What is now a small DMV-centered noodle chain, Yu Noodles began when Tony Cai and Andy Qiu opened their first shop in Rockville in 2018. Since then, Yu has expanded to locations in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia, plus Silver Spring and Ardmore, Pennsylvania. The Baltimore location is the newest, for which those of us who prefer to eat closer to home are very grateful. (Yu, by the way, is the recognized abbreviation of Chongqing, coming from Yuzhong, now the central district of Chongqing—the municipality in southwestern China known for its chile-heated cuisine.)
Tucked into a strip mall about a half-mile north of the Senator Theatre, Yu Noodles has a surprisingly roomy and elegant dining room, with cozy booths and wood-paneled walls, plus a menu that’s impressively expansive. There are the addictive xiaolongbao (xlb)—those soup dumplings—in four iterations, plus bowls of Chongqing and Sichuan noodles, rice bowls, and an entire dim sum menu featuring scallion pancakes, pork bao, wontons, pan-fried dumplings, and superb packages of sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. This had us particularly excited, because, with the exception of the marvelous dim sum (AYCE weekend brunch!) at NiHao in Canton, there is, sadly, almost no dim sum this far east of Ellicott City.
Xlb are tiny miracles. The steamed dumplings envelop a filling—pork is classic, but Yu also has spicy pork, shrimp, and chicken, which come in various pretty colors—and, somehow, a few spoonfuls of very hot soup broth. (The technique involves chilling collagen-rich broth into jelly, which can then be wrapped.)
They typically arrive in the baskets in which they are steamed, and eating them is something of a happily practiced skill. You need to lift them from their basket without puncturing the dumplings’ thin skin, so doing this with your fingers, rather than chopsticks, is more effective, even if it’s hotter. There will be spoons to help with the slurping, as well as accompanying tiny dishes of soy sauce with threads of fresh ginger.
And the soup, it should be said, can be scaldingly hot. At one splendid restaurant in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley, the xlb come not only in the traditional bite-size dumplings, but in fantastically large ones the size of tea-cup saucers. These are delivered with boba straws to suck out the soup, which makes sense if you think about it. Little xlb do not require boba straws, though Yu has a strong beverage menu, so you can always give it a try.
The best soup dumplings manage the trick of enclosing the fillings, and that soup, with wrappers that are nearly paper-thin. The thicker the wrappers, the less magical and more mundane the dumplings become. Yu’s dumplings are marvelous, dexterously made and come six to a basket. And although it’s tempting just to order all the baskets—24 would beat my daughter’s record of 19—the rest of the menu is just as good.
There are bowls of cold noodles sluiced with sesame paste and shrimp, or black vinegar and chicken, or torqued with extra spice, or intestines, if that’s your thing. And there’s a bowl of Yibin noodles, an iteration of dan dan mien, that hails from the Sichuan city that gives the dish its name.
The best bowl in my mind, though, is the Chongqing noodles: bouncy threads tangled around bok choy, cabbage, and peanuts, drenched in a dense, soulful soup loaded with but not overwhelmed by spice. The bowl arrives topped with a hard-fried egg thatched with scallions. It is comfort food at its finest—though a few more dumplings won’t hurt.
There are other fun things on the menu—potatoes cut into spirals and doused with cheese or plums, chicken feet, even somehow Buffalo wings with hot sauce. But it is the soup dumplings and noodles, all handmade and remarkably budget-friendly, that some of us will trek back for—especially as that trek is within city limits.