After nearly 25 years of serving handmade dumplings, crispy scallion pancakes, cold sesame noodles and hot chile oil to Burlington customers, Hong Yu plans to retire. Her business, Hong’s Chinese Dumplings, is for sale.
Yu, 65, started selling dumplings from a food cart on the Church Street Marketplace in 2000 and moved to a year-round spot at 77 Pearl Street in 2017. Rolling thousands of dumplings has taken a toll on her neck and hands, she said, and she sometimes feels dizzy working in the hot kitchen.
“This is time, you know?” Yu told Seven Days.
Yu said a price for the restaurant will emerge from her conversations with potential buyers. The sale would come with her entire catalog of recipes, she said, “even some not on the menu.” She plans to stay on and teach the new owners how to prepare the dumplings just as she has for so many years.
“I won’t just say, ‘Good luck,'” Yu said. “I’ll show them how to make everything.”
Yu learned to make dumplings from her mother in China when she was 10 years old. At first, she used two hands to roll the dough. Her mother corrected her: “No, one hand,” Yu recalled, explaining that the other hand should be used to crimp the dumpling’s edges so that they stay together.
“I made an ugly dumpling,” she said with a laugh. “The filling fell out. Nothing inside. My mom said, ‘It’s OK, Hong. That’s your dumpling. You go ahead and eat it.’ Next time, I did better.”
Yu’s dumplings improved to the point of celebrity: In March 2020, she was featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” on Food Network. A photo of Yu and “the Guy,” as she calls him, still hangs in the restaurant; customers come from across the U.S. and Canada because they saw her on the show, she said.
In her retirement, Yu plans to relax a little. “Then I have a new thing,” she said: She wants to create tai chi and dancing videos on TikTok. “And maybe I’ll sing,” she added. “Or knit. Follow me, you can have a hat!”
Hong’s is currently closed for the hot summer months. If she hasn’t found a buyer by fall, Yu said, she may reopen — and throw a big party to thank all of her longtime customers.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2024.
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