I’m hoping that by the time I post this review Zomato will have corrected the name of this family owned and run Chinese restaurant to its correct name of Lan Zhou Yi Jia. I came to the China Cluster of International City in search of a bowl of Dumpling Soup, the perfect way I thought, to start a rainy Friday in Dubai. The restaurant I sought was Oriental Dainty (who names these restaurants?) but found it had changed owners and was now Lan Zhou Yi Jia, owned and run by Mr. Abdulla and his family who indecently, were all up and already busy in the kitchen when I got there a little after 07:00. Mr. Abdulla by the way, is Chinese. He’s one of many Chinese Muslims who moved to Dubai with their families from the Lan Zhou province…where the handmade noodles are famously from. You learn something new every rainy day.

Many of the Chinese restaurants in the China Cluster of International City are solely geared up for catering to the Chinese. It totally throws them when a laowai (foreigner) walks in off the street, especially if it’s 7 am in the morning and he’s soaking wet, pointing to his phone and babbling gibberish about dumpling soup while dripping all over the floor they mopped clean just a minute ago. In my case, I think it was a combination of the pathetic desperation in-which I was trying to explain myself, and the fact that I was looking for the restaurant his had replaced which appealed to him. Whatever it was, Mr. Abdulla invited me in, sat me down, quickly brought me a pot of lukewarm green tea and went back into the kitchen to make the Dumpling Soup I had come all the way there to have. He well could have simply thrown me out. It’s happened to me before.

My bowl of piping hot soup was on the table and in-front of me in under ten minutes, little dumplings bobbing up and down in and among the chopped cilantro stems and dried chili flakes. And wow! It truly was, I-ate-every-last-dumpling amazing and well worth the almost comic effort I had to go through. And there lies the main point, many of the hard-core Chinese restaurants in the China Cluster of International City may not be geared up to cater to us, the non-Chinese, but in most instances the restaurant owners are more than happy to oblige. And if like me, you love authentic Chinese food, then you’ll brave the challenges…starting with the language barrier. The rest is actually quite a lot of fun and, in my mind, just adds to the authenticity of it all.

Waste NOT, Want NOT.