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New on the Menu

Articles on new and innovative food and beverage items trending across the independent restaurant landscape

New on the Menu: Three dumplings and a cocktail

And also a tuna Napoleon

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

April 30, 2021

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Pretty much every cuisine has some kind of dumpling, and this week we look at three of them.

Shanghai Taste in Las Vegas has a whole new lineup of dumplings, including a soup dumpling filled with shrimp and cucumber juice.

The Mandarin Chinese word for soup dumpling is xiao long bao. The long is the steamer tray in which the dumplings are served. Xiao means “small” because the tray is smaller than those used for the more common, fluffier dumplings. Bao, as you might have guessed, means dumpling.

Chef and owner Jimmy Li colors them green with bok choi juice, and green is also the theme of the seasonal dumpling at Alfie’s Kitchen & Bar in New York City, where chef Darren Pettigrew is stuffing ravioli with peas and serving them in a buttery green sauce.

In Napa Valley, at Press in St. Helena, Calif., Philip Tessier is forming dumpling skin simply by covering ricotta balls with fine 00 flour, which he then wraps in squash blossoms for delicate gnudi.

But not everything’s a dumpling. At The Winery Restaurant & Wine Bar, with two locations in Southern California, chef Yvon Goetz draws inspiration from a French dessert to make a stacked tuna tartare, in in Denver, at Forget Me Not Cocktail Bar, the flavor of birch gives nuance to a take on the Old Fashioned.

Contact Bret at [email protected]

Find him on Twitter: @FoodWriterDiary

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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