I heard about Dumpling World, a small chain with four locations in Texas, from a friend in Houston. I certainly never expected them to open their first non-Texas location in Everett! As soon as I heard about it, I made an appointment to visit the next day for a weekday lunch. When we arrived a bit after noon, we found the place to be very busy but during our time there there was never a wait for seating. While the restaurant is still in the soft opening phase, it seems like they've figured out most of the kinks. Ordering is easily done at each table via QR code. They also have physical menus and are happy to take orders in person. At each table, they provide lemon spa water to drink. The first dish took about 10 minutes to arrive and the last, the shengjian bao (SJB), took around 25 minutes as they batch fry these and then bring out to multiple tables at once. I do have to comment that they have a pretty interesting music selection - synth/techno-ish. At least they play it at a low volume! Pan-Fried Thumb Bun - Shrimp & Pork & Chive, 10pc ($13.95) - This is essentially a modified XLB, fortified to meet the demands of pan frying. The bottoms are lightly golden brown and give a pretty decent crisp. The dough is a bit thicker than the actual XLBs to hold up to being fried. They are still nicely chewy and remain intact with no holes. Dumpling World is pretty generous with the filling, mixing plenty of fragrant chive into the pork meatball and also stuffing in an entire small shrimp in each ball. This is basically an XLB with slightly thicker skin and without any aspic to leak out (although still juicy). Flavorful and delicious. (5/5) Pan-Fried Pork Soup Bun, 4pc ($11.95) - We finally have another proper 混水生煎-style SJB spot around Seattle. Tons of soup, almost two soup spoons worth, reside in each pan fried bun. The soup has a lighter kind of taste, like it's missing some fatty savoriness. I think they rely on mushroom powder to boost the glutamate properties (at least, I taste a bit of mushroominess in the apisc), which results in a broth that isn't quite as tasty as others I've eaten. Still, the ones Dumpling World serves have thin skins, are fried to a good crisp level, being golden brown, and are appropriately sprinkled with scallion and sesame. They seem to be spaced out in the fry pan, rather than the traditional method of being packed together. While not as good as the top tier SJB places near Vancouver, these are perfectly acceptable, especially given that there's only one other spot I've found in the greater Seattle area that serves this type of SJB. (4/5) Spicy Braised Beef Noodle Soup, Mild Spicy ($17.95) - Plenty of tender and fatty chunks of beef float in a mildly spicy noodle soup. The beef is braised to perfection, becoming almost fall apart. The noodles are of the curly variety and are cooked until bouncy. The broth tastes like a bit of tomato mixed with beef and chili oil. At mild, the dish isn't very spicy at all, but it does get in the back of the throat a bit. It's flavorful enough, especially for a place that's more known for dumplings. Two half heads of blanched bok choy complete the dish. (4/5) Pork Xiao Long Bao, 6pc ($13.95) - Although we were stuffed from the above three dishes, we couldn't help but to order this extra dish. At first we were confused - $14 for 6 XLBs? That's awfully expensive... and then the dish came out. These XLBs are huge, easily 3x the volume of a typical soup dumpling, with the amount of soup to match (note: not as big as a tang bao). A ton of savory and salty, aromatic soup in a very thin wrapper. The soup tastes different from from the SJB by virtue of being more savory and salty. Because these are so large and unwieldy, it's actually difficult to eat, necessitating sucking the soup out of the wrapper rather then pouring it into the soup spoon and sipping as I usually prefer. The pleated area on top is on the thicker side, rendering it chewy, but I don't see a way they could thin it out other than by shrinking the bao. They do twist it into a hollow circle to get it as thin as possible. As with the SJB, the pork filling is on the denser side, which is the only real negative to this dish. (5/5) Dumpling World is definitely a great addition to the dumpling scene in the area. I'll be back for more! Bathrooms - Two rooms read more