Stay Hungry
Photo by Cheryl Waller.
For a first-timer, ordering at LuLu Seafood & Dim Sum involves a lot of pointing.
There are more than 100 dishes to choose from, hot and cold, vegetarian and meat-filled, from steamed barbecue pork buns and chilled jellyfish to garlic-topped seaweed and soup-filled dumplings. On the weekends, diners point and pick from metal carts pushed around by waitstaff.
Julia Li knows the menu inside and out, but she still points as she orders in a mixture of Chinese and English. “You don’t even need to know what you’re ordering,” she jokes. Her family opened its first restaurant in the St. Louis area when she was just 6, and over the years she’s lived in Shanghai, St. Louis, Los Angeles and New York. A steamer basket of Shanghai soup dumplings has arrived at the table, and after snapping a picture for social media, Julia deftly picks up a dumpling with maroon chopsticks.
“Uh oh – I pierced it a little bit!” says Julia, blowing on the dumpling to cool it off. “There is soup in there – it’s called a soup dumpling because there is literally a little pocket of soup. Just don’t burn your mouth. The proper way to eat this is to put some ginger on it, put some vinegar on it and then blow on it a little bit because you don’t want to burn your face! This is from Shanghai, where I’m from. I could eat this all day. Literally, it’s like, people eat this all day. Eat 20, 30 – it’s hangover food. Dumplings are amazing for that.”