About My Neighbours The Dumplings
My Neighbours the Dumplings is an independently run Chinese Dumpling House. We specialise in hand made dumplings, rolled fresh everyday by our expert Dumpling Team around the corner from the restaurants in Hackney. Although we are not strictly a Dim Sum restaurant, we follow the Dim Sum style of eating; lots of small dishes that are shared amongst the table.
We choose only quality ingredients for all our dishes and we make everything ourselves to make sure it tastes as good as it can! All our meat is higher welfare and our fish is sustainably sourced. Where possible fresh produce is sourced from the UK and in season. Whilst we take a lot of inspiration from Cantonese cooking and Dim Sum, we are of mixed origin ourselves, so sticking to traditional recipes is not our aim - there are playful as well as nostalgic dishes on our menu which pay homage to the rich cultural background from which we come.
We have a great range of sake supplied by Tengu Sake, who sources sake from small family run breweries in Japan. Our wines are all organic and sourced from small scale producers in Europe. We have a regularly changing cocktail list where we play around with our take on the classics. And we have a good selection of mocktails and alcohol free drinks including a range of Chinese teas.
OUR STORY
Back in the days before the restaurants and before we had kids we used to invite friends round to our flat in Hackney for dumplings, rolling them together, sometimes with good sake, always with good music - three of our great loves. That was the beginning of our grass roots journey and unleashing My Neighbours the Dumplings into the world and here is our story.
We started with a weekly pop-up held above a grocery store on Lower Clapton road. In those early days we were joined by Carol Lee, now our Head Dumpling chef, who brought a certain class to this starry-eyed operation, rolling faster and better than we ever had! After feeling a buzz gather around our busy pop up, we threw caution to the wind and opened our first Dumpling House on the same road back in 2016. Exactly one month after opening, our very own little dumpling was born - So when we opened our basement Sake bar later that year we decided to call it Matilda’s.
In 2019 we opened our second restaurant in Victoria Park Village, serving a slightly different menu but retaining the ethos of making all our dishes in-house using only the best ingredients. Each day our dumpling rollers turn up early to freshly prepare dumpling recipes and hand roll the dumplings for that day, carefully wrapping the delicious filling with care and precision. They say you can taste love through food and we believe there is no better way to share our heart and dedication than through our humble little dumplings.
Our Dumpling Team now hand-roll up to 8,000 dumplings a week.
In 2020, with high demand for our tasty dumplings during the lockdown and with the restaurant's regularly being locked down, we decided to throw caution to the wind once again and launched our retail range of dumplings and sauces. Selling the most trusted, flavoursome, and juiciest dumplings for our customers to cook and enjoy in their own homes. Supplying retailers such as Wholefoods, Selfridges, and Harvey Nichols, not to mention another 100 or so of some of the best independent Deli’s and stores up and down the country.
After a whirlwind few years and three children later, in 2024 we made the decision to put a pause on our retail range and focus on what we know best, our restaurants!
And as they say, the rest and best is still to come :)
