RICKSHAW DUMPLING TRUCK: A Review

Today, the Rickshaw dumpling truck was parked outside Columbia University so I gave it a try. It gets an A for marketing, a hip and modern design update to  Del Re’s knife grinding truck. I LOL’d reading the line, “Who’s your Edamame?” The academic in me had a little beef with using the term rickshaw because doesn’t that just reinforce Orientalist views of Asians as subservient (and specifically, as service workers)? Their website also has a little modernized Chinese jingle…

But most people don’t think about these issues so I will move on to the food. The $6 dumplings were just mediocre and I was very hungry, which probably means they’re less than mediocre. They were lukewarm and the sauce was a bit watered down. I’m Taiwanese, so I know about my dumplings. But my friend reported that the $4 Calamansi-Ade was “pretty good” and the plastic cup was actually made out of vegetables. Overall, not sure Rickshaw deserves all the hype. Oh yeah, they also stiffed me $4 in change, which I didn’t realize until I got home. My bill was $8, and she said to me, “out of $20?” So no way that getting a $5 bill and three $1 bills back was an accident.

In other news, apparently there’s a bit of a food truck war going on between Kenny Lao, owner of Rickshaw, and  Vadim Ponorovsky of Frites and Meats.