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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.
Downtown L.A.’s Camélia, a bistro serving French dishes inflected with Japanese flavors, comes to life from the couple behind Tsubaki.
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.
The Fong family hoped to build a restaurant ingrained in Altadena and Pasadena. Now, much of that community is gone.
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.
Good Alley
8450 E. Valley Blvd., Rosemead, (626) 280-2800, good-alley.com
Prices: Appetizers $6.58-$25.50, guan tang bao (soup dumplings) $13.58-$23.58, other dishes $8.58-$20.58, tea drinks $5.95-$7.25
Details: Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Beer, sake and soju. Lot and street parking.
Recommended dishes: Chicken guan tang bao; rou jia mo (a.k.a. Chinese burger) with cumin lamb; steamed jiaozi filled with pork, shrimp, egg and chive; big plate chicken; dry-pot cauliflower with pork belly; stir-fried snow pea leaves; honey black tea hand-muddled with lemon.
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