Asian Food

New Chinese restaurant slays Southlake with juicy dumplings and noodles

Dumplings that taste as good as they look.

Photo courtesy of Dragon House

A new Chinese restaurant in Southlake open less than a month is already slaying diners with its juicy soup dumplings and hand-pulled noodles. Called Dragon House, it's open at 2640 E. Southlake Blvd., in what was most recently a Pollo Tropical, and before that a Steak N Shake.

According to a representative from the restaurant, Dragon House opened on April 3, with a menu of authentic mainland Chinese food in an upscale setting, perfect for the Southlake crowd.

The menu is expansive, with Szechuan, Shanghainese, Americanized Chinese, dim sum, and even a few Thai items such as pad Thai.

Real-deal dishes include glutinous balls with mushrooms and greens, dan dan noodles, salt-and-pepper shrimp, and Singapore noodles. Stand-out vegetarian dishes include eggplant in garlic sauce and a cauliflower hot pot.

But the stars of the show are xiao long bao, also known as soup dumplings, sometimes known as juicy dumplings. They feature a station where you can watch the dumplings being made.

They also have a display where you can see noodles being pulled by hand.

The soup dumplings are steamed and brought to the table in a covered bamboo dish, six doughy rounds to an order, appealing twisted on top to close. The filling inside, is either your choice of ground pork or shrimp, along with hot broth, which seeps out once you break it open. The combination of the filling, the hot broth, and the soft dough is a comfort food that's easy to love.

Other delicacies include pan-fried pork buns with hot broth, with a brown and crunchy bottom that contrasts with the softness of the dumpling on top; and scallion pancakes, a pan-fried crispy pancake with chopped scallions mixed into the batter.

There's an amazing dish called turnip puffs, consisting of pan-fried puffs with sliced turnip and matcha powder; and a trendy dish called honeycomb pan-fried dumplings, also known as Guo Tie, where pork dumplings are fried together in a honeycomb shape.

There are also the usual assortment of "Chinese" dishes you find at most restaurants, such as fried rice and kung pao chicken. You can't have a Chinese restaurant in the suburbs without those staples.

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Chef News

Fort Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center welcomes bright new chef

FortWorthtx.gov

Will Rogers Memorial Center

There's a new chef in town: Waylon Cornelius, named executive chef of catering and concessions for Craft Culinary Concepts, the food and beverage provider at Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Will Rogers Memorial Center is the 120-acre entertainment complex anchoring Fort Worth’s Cultural District, owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth. Cornelius will oversee menus for trade shows and other events at the center which bring in more than 2 million visitors a year.

Craft Culinary Concepts is headquartered in Glendale, Arizona, and manages food and beverage programs for entertainment, sports and cultural facilities.

Chef Waylon Corneliusfortworthtx.gov

According to a release, Cornelius joined the team this summer and is already shifting the expectations of guests from a typical “BBQ and beans” menu to a bill of fare satisfying every kind of palate.

“We always have fajitas ready to go, but we also make a beautiful Beef Wellington or baked salmon with a pink salt crust,” Cornelius says in a statement.

For consumer trade shows, Craft and its partners Caribou and Taco Heads offer more choices for the thousands of guests who attend events at WRMC annually.

“Some of our equestrian guests are away from home and here for several days, and they need more than popcorn and hot dogs,” Cornelius says. “Our concessions offer biscuits and gravy, burritos made in-house, strawberry salad, fruit and yogurt cups.”

A native of Mansfield, Cornelius grew up helping in a farm-to-table kitchen. He was raised on a farm with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather -- a Vietnam veteran who enjoyed vegetable gardens and raising hogs and chickens. He studied computer science after high school and holds an associate's degree in Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis from Tarrant County College.

He's a 2003 graduate of AIMS Academy of Culinary Arts in Dallas where he was mentored by a number of great chefs. While training as assistant executive sous chef at the AAA four-diamond Grand Hyatt DFW, he worked with Executive Chef Sutti Sripolpa, chef Eric Dreyer (who went on to be Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef), and Chef Jean-Claude Plihon, under whom he honed his French cooking skills.

As executive sous chef at the opening of Perry’s Steakhouse and Grille in Southlake, Cornelius gained expertise with volume. While at HG Sply Co., he learned about gluten-free items and other food allergies.

HG Sply is also where he crossed paths with Chef James R. Schell III, Craft’s general manager at WRMC, who recruited Cornelius to the complex.

"James said he needed someone who can hit moving targets, push the culinary team to be more avant-garde and use locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, so here I am," Cornelius says. "Culinary is a small world."

“I want people to say, ‘When we were in Fort Worth, you won’t believe what we got at Will Rogers!’” Schell says. “Even the celebrities who perform [in the auditorium] are surprised. When Chicago played here recently and we served dinner backstage, they said they felt treated like the Rolling Stones.”

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