My work friend has been in town visiting family from Amsterdam, so I agreed to meet her for dinner at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing tonight. I’d had this on my Yelp bookmarks list forever and had been dying to come for a long time, but I was never able to make it work until today. Dumpling Galaxy is pretty much any dumpling lover’s dream: the biggest variety of dumplings you could possibly think of, all on a single menu. And if for whatever reason you don’t want dumplings, they have a pretty extensive Chinese menu that is supposed to be delicious outside of the dumpling section. This place certainly met expectations; my favorites were the lamb and green squash dumplings and the cod and fish roe dumplings.

I make a lot of judgments about people when it comes to food. One of the potentially worst ones is that there’s a high correlation between extremely picky eaters and people who are racist. Some of the other ones are… if you’re not willing to try new foods, you’re probably just a really boring human being. If you hate all Asian food, you must be a horrible (and racist) person. If you repel any and all spice… well, I just don’t want to hang out with you. If you don’t eat sweets, you must not be a very sweet person. But another one I want to add to the list is… if you don’t like dumplings, you probably cannot be trusted. Who doesn’t like some incredibly flavorful filling stuffed into a little dough, then boiled, steamed, or fried?

The New York Times food critic who came to Dumpling Galaxy said that a single bite of a dumpling from this place had more flavor than a large percentage of full meals in his entire life. That — that is how life changing a single dumpling can be.