Delicious Gyoza and Awesome Cheap Eats at Dumpling Kings in Japan!
Chinese food is popular with locals and expats alike in Japan, and where better to get some delicious Chinese grub than at a branch of the popular Dumpling King chain? You can find a Dumpling King (餃子の王将 ) in almost every prefecture in Japan and their popularity is evident through the length of queues to get in the door, particularly around lunchtime. What you may not know is that aside from moreish dumplings and authentic fried rice, this restaurant chain is hiding a shady secret that has roots in the yakuza – the Japanese mafia.
We first stumbled on the Dumpling King in Kyoto. Being an expensive city, we were tired of splashing out on fancy dinners and wanted something cheap and cheerful. There are branches of this restaurant throughout Japan with a store locator on its website to make it easy to find one near you. We have since visited our local branch several times, always looking forward to our next visit.
Menus vary slightly depending on which region you’re in, but the basic principal is the same – cheap, filling Chinese food with flavors preferable to the Japanese palate. In other words, the food you’ll find at Dumpling King is much closer to a ‘Chinese takeaway’ that you can get in the UK than it is to the authentic flavors of real Chinese food. If you’re like me, this will be your preference anyway – having lived in China (and experienced years of super oily, super spicy, and often ‘unclean’ food products), then you’ll welcome the calorific goodness of an old fashioned takeaway.
The signature dish at Dumpling King is… yeah, you’ve guessed it – dumplings. A plate of six gyoza will set you back only 220 yen – some branches have posters on the wall boasting how many servings of dumplings they have managed to serve within a given time frame. Walk into the restaurant at any time of day and you’ll be hard pushed to find a customer who isn’t eating gyoza. They’re good – ordering a plate of these is pretty much a given.
Like Japanese food, Chinese cuisine is designed very much for sharing, and as such, they offer plates of food at a reasonable price and fairly large servings so that you can order a couple of plates to share with your company. Main dishes cost about 400 yen to 600 yen each, and for a party of two, I recommend two main dishes to share, as well as some gyoza and maybe rice or noodles, depending on how hungry you are.
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