logo
Review: Head to this new SGV dumpling parlor for Kaifeng-style xiao long bao

Review: Head to this new SGV dumpling parlor for Kaifeng-style xiao long bao

Four variations of guan tang bao — a style of soup dumplings popularized in Kaifeng, a city in north-central China's Henan province — headline the menu at Good Alley in Rosemead. Pork anchors three of the fillings. The fourth, featuring chicken, surprised me as the standout.
For each version, the restaurant's kitchen staff shape consistently sized, medium-small guan tang bao. Their pleats, rather than perfect spiral patterns, often arrive in a handsome, wobbly sort of squiggle. The Kaifeng style calls for a slightly thicker dough than the more common xiao long bao inspired by Shanghainese traditions, though these bundles are plenty supple.
Using a pair of black chopsticks, I lift a chicken dumpling out of its steamer basket, perch it on a wide spoon and tear a small puncture in its side. I pick up the parcel again and do my best to gracefully tip the liquid inside onto the spoon. Soup pours out with the unusually concentrated texture of double stock — another hallmark of the Kaifeng variety. Its flavor is out-and-out poultry; ginger and scallion linger far in the background.
In a single bite, the wrapper's rumpled folds give way to a yielding ball of ground chicken in its center. Eating one is a small, contenting ritual, and more await, cooling quickly.
Guan tang bao have been the word-of-mouth lure since owners David Shao and Peter Pang, who also operate Ji Rong Peking Duck around the corner in the same building, opened Good Alley in September. You'll see dumplings on most every table, among dishes of cucumbers cut in cylinders and stacked with a gloss of XO sauce, sticky sweet-and-sour ribs, rou jia mo (popularly described in English as a 'Chinese burger'), and maybe a tureen of soup or spice-freckled dapanji, the Uyghur-style 'big plate chicken.'
Good Alley lands as part dumpling parlor and part tea house (the drink selection runs the milky, citrus-muddled-cheese foam gamut). Mostly, though, it's the sort of attractive cosmopolitan mishmash, culling staples from many of China's regional cuisines, that would fit seamlessly among the modern cafes in one of Shanghai's multitiered, high-design shopping centers.
These qualities also give the restaurant an immediate, innate place among the pantheon of strip malls of the San Gabriel Valley.
If soup dumplings figure among your L.A. culinary obsessions, these guan tang bao merit your attention. Their compact, appealingly denser structure is distinct from, say, the blowsier swirls of dough at Hui Tou Xiang in San Gabriel and Hollywood — or, a very favorite of mine, the delicate packages served a mile away at Shanghai Dumpling House. They're so thin there that in hoisting them they stretch from the weight of their contents, to a form that brings to mind a zucchini blossom.
Among Good Alley's porky versions, I lean into the riff also laced with crab and its roe for fishy-sweet contrast, and shrink most from the truffle-flavored aberrant (but then, the synthetic musk of truffle oil and its counterparts, even if flecked with real fungus, have long been substances I loathe).
For comparison, the kitchen crew also flex their skills with other shapes that fall into the broad, beautifully amorphous category of dumplings: wrinkly, homey steamed jiaozi stuffed with soothing combinations like pork, shrimp, egg and chive, and sheer wontons (pork, chicken or shrimp) drifting in subtle broth.
You will be wanting crunch after all this slippery goodness, which the rou jia mo delivers nicely. For the 'burger' bun, Shao and Pang switch out the classic baiji mo (a yeasted bread often resembling an extra-large English muffin) for crackling thousand-layer pancake that cradles one of several options of chopped meats. Wagyu carries its name-recognition cachet, though I'm most taken by the tender mince of lamb sparked with cumin.
Now for something green: a bright tangle of snow pea leaves fragrant with garlic and barely slicked with oil from a toss in the wok, or similarly heat-blasted green beans sharpened with XO sauce, or frilly Napa cabbage boiled to melting submission in superior broth amped with ham and dried seafood. Any of them lighten the meal.
Round it all out with a meaty centerpiece, either the big plate chicken hiding wide noodles at the base of its stew-filled bowl, or a sleeper hit of dry pot cauliflower strewn with thin-cut slabs of pork belly.
Otherwise? Follow your inclinations to gentle scallion oil noodles paired with julienned cucumbers, a respectable and generous bowl of beef noodle soup or the red-stained ribs with meat that tugs easily from the bone. Dumplings arguably will leave the most lasting impression, but the chefs show command of every dish that leaves the kitchen.
One word about the tea program, which broadly pleases in its basic choices of black, white or oolong, and its range of the simplest brews to concoctions of strawberry slush with cheese foam: Every drink arrives either in a plastic or paper cup. The packaging makes it easy to finish the last sips on the go, but for someone who wants a beverage specifically with a sit-down meal, a disposable cup feels wasteful. I hope, as the restaurant settles in, Shao and Pang will consider investing in durable tea ware.
They certainly appear to be enjoying early success with Good Alley. The dining room — bright and soothing in neutral browns and grays, with woven lanterns the color of clay hanging overhead — is usually full during lunch and dinner hours. Service defines efficiency: Staffers quickly take your order, and ask how sweet you'd like your tea in a zero to 100 percentage. Dishes appear at a crisp but not off-puttingly rushed pace.
The staff's assuredness is comforting, honestly, as is the quiet ceremony of eating soup dumplings. There will be no cure-all balm while Los Angeles grapples with the fallout from the most destructive fires in its history. You will need restoratives along the road to some sense of recovery and wholeness, and Good Alley lives up to its name.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Tear it down, they said. He just kept building.
Tear it down, they said. He just kept building.

Boston Globe

time21 hours ago

  • Boston Globe

Tear it down, they said. He just kept building.

Advertisement From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live. 'They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,' he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month. 'But the advantage is that it's conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,' he added. 'Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.' Chen's house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou province, in southwestern China. It evokes a Dr. Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in 'Harry Potter.' Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to 'Howl's Moving Castle.' Advertisement To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity. To Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbors and seemingly even common sense. He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build. Chen's parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave. When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier. Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money. They visited a secondhand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns. Then, Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Chen did it alone. Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth. 'I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,' he said. 'And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.' Advertisement He was also fueled by resentment toward the government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family. By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbors had all moved into the new apartment buildings about 3 miles away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.) Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country's modernization push. The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called 'nail houses,' for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared. Still, few stick out quite like Chen's. A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesperson, insurance agent and courier. But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay. 'I don't want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,' he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove. In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending. In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China's poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.) Advertisement But Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies. On the first floor, Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou. On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology. The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle. On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles. With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: 'That's what makes it fun.' (His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.) Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys. He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure. 'There's a law of increasing entropy,' Chen said. 'This house, if I didn't care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.' He added, 'But as long as I'm still standing, it will be too.' Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than $20,000 on building materials. He has also spent about $4,000 on lawyers. His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Chen's whims. His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns. They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy. Advertisement 'Now we just don't go over there,' said Tianliang, Chen's brother. 'There's no need to listen to what they say about us.' In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.) But others expressed admiration for Chen's creativity. Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close. 'There are people who say it's illegal,' he said. Then he added, 'But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame.' This article originally appeared in

ILEARN scores still stagnant, five years post-pandemic
ILEARN scores still stagnant, five years post-pandemic

Axios

time2 days ago

  • Axios

ILEARN scores still stagnant, five years post-pandemic

Learning in Indiana's elementary and middle schools continues to stagnate, particularly in reading. Why it matters: Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic's onset, scores on statewide tests designed to measure students against grade-level proficiency standards in English and math have yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, according to ILEARN results released this week by the Indiana Department of Education. Learning gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing schools persist, meaning that where a child lives can still have an outsize impact on their education. Between the lines: Scores significantly dropped from 2019 to 2021 — the first year in the pandemic that the test was given — and have stagnated since then. The state has invested heavily in new reading education strategies, trainings and materials, but scores remain flat. By the numbers: Statewide, just 31% of students passed both the English and math portions, meaning they're on track to graduate high school ready for college or a career. Overall, math scores were the bright spot, increasing 1.4 points to 42.1%, while English scores actually dipped by 0.4 points to 40.6% Reality check: Proficiency rates vary widely based on demographic factors — only 13% of Black and 18% of Hispanic students passed both portions, compared to 38% of white students. Students from low-income families were also proficient at lower rates (19%) than their peers who don't qualify for meal assistance (42%). The big picture: Performance on standardized testing is closely tied to socioeconomic and other demographic factors. Once again, districts surrounding Marion County — Brownsburg, Carmel Clay and Zionsville — were among the top-performing in the state. Zoom in: In Marion County, Speedway Schools had the highest scores of traditional districts, with nearly half of students passing both portions and 55% proficiency in English and 61% in math. Franklin, Washington and Perry townships were the only other districts to have more than 25% of students pass both exams. Indianapolis Public Schools, the largest district, posted nearly the same results as last year but in English but small a gain in math. Warren Township had the lowest scores but made one of the biggest gains in English — increasing its proficiency rate more than 2 points over the last year. It also gained more than 4 points in math. What's next: This upcoming school year will be the first that new ILEARN checkpoint exams are administered throughout the year statewide, with a shorter end-of-year assessment.

China Reveals Encounter With Western Aircraft Carrier in Contested Waters
China Reveals Encounter With Western Aircraft Carrier in Contested Waters

Newsweek

time2 days ago

  • Newsweek

China Reveals Encounter With Western Aircraft Carrier in Contested Waters

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The Chinese military reported encountering a foreign aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, where the East Asian power maintains sweeping sovereignty claims over most of the waters. Newsweek has contacted the Chinese Defense Ministry for further comment via email. Why It Matters China and neighboring countries—including the Philippines, a United States mutual defense treaty ally—are involved in ongoing territorial disputes over maritime features in the energy-rich South China Sea, often leading to standoffs and clashes between rival maritime forces. Encounters between Chinese and foreign military aircraft and vessels are not uncommon as Beijing has accused foreign militaries of conducting "close-in" operations by approaching its territorial airspace and waters, both of which extend 13.8 miles from the country's coastline. What To Know The Chinese military—officially known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA)—published a news story on Thursday about flight operations aboard the aircraft carrier CNS Shandong. While the article focused on the Shandong's fighter jets launching from and landing on the flight deck, it also said that during an unspecified summer in the South China Sea, a foreign aircraft carrier was spotted approaching the Shandong and its naval task group. A Chinese J-15 fighter jet during the open event of the aircraft carrier CNS Shandong in Hong Kong on July 4. A Chinese J-15 fighter jet during the open event of the aircraft carrier CNS Shandong in Hong Kong on July 4. Dai Menglan/China News Service/VCG via AP It further said that the unidentified foreign aircraft carrier frequently launched aircraft that flew toward the Chinese carrier at high speed, prompting the Shandong to enter what it described as "combat status" and launch J-15 fighter jets armed with weapons in response. According to the article, the Chinese fighter aircraft "successfully drove away" the foreign aircraft after dogfighting—a term that refers to close-range maneuvers between two aircraft. This was the second encounter between Chinese and foreign aircraft carriers publicized by China this year. In April, Chinese media aired footage showing a J-15 fighter jet flying close to a fighter aircraft that appears to be an F/A-18, operated by the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier fleet. In early July, both the U.S. and China deployed aircraft carriers in the South China Sea—USS George Washington and the Shandong, respectively. The former was operating in the Timor Sea, north of Australia, as of Tuesday, according to photos released by the U.S. Navy. Open-source satellite imagery spotted the Shandong at its home port on China's southern island of Hainan—north of the South China Sea—on Thursday. The warship was one of two Chinese aircraft carriers simultaneously deployed in the broader western Pacific in June. 🔍 🇨🇳PLAN Naval Watch: Recent imagery shows the bulk of the South Sea Amphibious Fleet back in port at Zhanjiang. However, the activity doesn't stop there! We're tracking a Type 075 LHD inbound to Longpo/Yulin, alongside a flurry of movements just outside Longpo/Yulin… — MT Anderson (@MT_Anderson) July 18, 2025 What People Are Saying The U.S. Pacific Fleet told Newsweek in April: "We don't have a comment on specific operations, engagements, or training, but we routinely operate in the vicinity of foreign aircraft and ships in international waters and airspace in the Indo-Pacific." Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry, said in May 2023: "[T]he U.S. side has frequently sent aircraft and vessels to conduct close-in reconnaissance on China, seriously threatening China's sovereignty and security. Such provocative and dangerous moves are the root cause for maritime security issues." What Happens Next It is likely that close encounters between Chinese and foreign forces—particularly those of the U.S.—will continue as both sides maintain their presence in the western Pacific.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store