#194: Brooklyn Dumpling Shop

The Bar

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. 1401 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 11/3/2023 @ 7:30pm.

UPDATE: Brooklyn Dumpling Shop has closed.

The Drink

Red velvet frosé. Red wine, rosé wine, blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry. $5.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop has an automat-style alcohol service, which meant that there was no bartender to ask for a recommendation, so Rome and I had to puzzle out the most representative drink for ourselves. We were in a frosé mood, which turned out to be a major tactical error. The ordering process seemed fairly simple: after you walk in, there's a kiosk where you punch in your food and drink order, and once you've paid you take your printed ticket and wait for your number to display and your order to appear in a matching cubby. The alternative to frosé was a beer from the brief selection in the display cooler next to the kiosk. This is a setup meant for high-trust environments, as there is nothing to stop an underage person from grabbing a beer instead of a Coke from the cooler or simply drinking without paying, but if you love abiding laws as much as we do, ordering is simple. There is also a lychee frosé option available for ordering if red velvet isn't your thing, as well as many beer options, though only Montucky, Sapporo, and Yuengling were available in the cooler at the time. 

The beer options came in handy because our frosé experience was disastrous. We had a to wait a really long time for our drinks to be poured from the frosé machine in the back amid what seemed like a general operational crisis situation, judging by the number of unhappy people who were also waiting for their orders. We ordered at 7:22pm, had a waiting Montucky after 15 minutes, had another waiting Sapporo after another 15 minutes, and then finally received our drinks at 8:02pm. At one point a server came out with a tray of free apology frosés, but those ran out before we could get ours. That might have been a blessing in disguise, as our eventual reward for our patience was two half-melted draughts of vaguely fruit-flavored burgundy mush in cheap plastic cups. The only thing worse than most frozen drinks are melted frozen drinks, as the sickly flavors and harsh alcohols disguised by the ice are revealed by the thaw like so many dead lawns uncovered by retreating snow. This wasn't the worst frozen drink I've ever had, but I still wouldn't recommend seeking it out. It's certainly no Violet Crown Iron Whip, the best frozen drink on Sixth Street.

However, it turns out that if you love waiting a long time for flavored slush, you can ignore me and simulate my experience from the comfort of your own home, as for some reason Brooklyn Dumpling Shop allows you to buy this frosé for yourself online (hilariously, they faithfully replicate the extremely trusting honor system of the in-store experience by only allowing you to select the Yes option under the Are You Over 21 Year Old? question). Buy the single-serving size, forget about it in the freezer for a while, take it out and dump it in a solo cup, let it sit out on the counter and sludgify for an appropriately infuriating amount of time, and enjoy: you've got yourself an authentic Brooklyn Dumpling Shop frosé! 

The Crew

Rome, Aaron.

Notes

This location of the national chain Brooklyn Dumpling Shop had been open for about two months when we stopped by. The automat concept, where you minimize interaction with other people by ordering via machine and picking up your own food from a numbered receptacle after it's been made, goes back over a hundred years. It was never all that common, but it faded away in popularity in the US over the 20th century for a variety of reasons: abundant cheap labor, our preference for customizing our orders, and a general preference for table service. Automats experienced a minor revival after the pandemic since the appeal of minimizing both labor costs and human contact became more salient, and you can imagine the owners figuring that a restaurant targeted at introverts would find a niche in this neighborhood of new apartment construction, where presumably there would be a critical mass of customers who prefer not to talk to people. 

Unfortunately, the obvious downside of this model is still present, namely that it's really annoying to have a simple issue with a simple order but not be able to flag down a waiter to get it fixed. Instead you have to sit at a table in an exceptionally bland and no-frills restaurant interior trading sympathetic eye contacts and drink clinks with other similarly frustrated clientele until the culinary gears get unstuck and your order is dispensed. I don't like to completely judge a new restaurant before they've finished working out all the kinks, but given that the actual food is evidently nothing to write home about, I feel comfortable in officially Not Recommending this establishment. As a Texan, I should have known better than to trust anything from New York City, right?