by MARK SLUTSKY

I've had an interest in northern Chinese cuisine since visiting the great Niu Kee restaurant in Chinatown (corner of St-Laurent and de la Gauchetière) a couple of years ago. With unusual seasonings and spices - the heavy use of cumin, for instance - it's an intriguing variation on traditional Chinese cuisine.

Manchuria Dumpling King, which opened a year or so ago on St-Mathieu, not far from Concordia, offers quite a few northern - or north-eastern - dishes, along with the wide variety of dumplings from whence the place gets its name. Service was prompt and helpful, and the place had the feel of a cozy neighbourhood spot with lots of regulars. For a small restaurant, the menu is impressively long.

The dumplings themselves come in every possible permutation a restaurant-goer might want. Pork and celery. Pork and chives. Pork and cabbage. Pork and pickled Chinese cabbage. Pork and seafood. Seafood. Salmon and green pepper. Beef and carrot. Chicken and cucumber. Vegetarian. (All of these range in price from $5.99–$7.49.) If that's not enough choice, the non-dumpling section of the menu offers somewhere in the neighbourhood of 160 different dishes. Somewhat bewildered, my friends and I solicited the advice of our waitress, who suggested the lamb with cumin ($11.99) and the hedgehog hydnum mushrooms with vegetables ($9.99).

Lamb! Since I rarely come across that particular meat in Chinese restaurants, and because we were eager to see just what these hedgehog mushrooms were all about, we took her advice, also throwing in the Manchuria-style crispy pork spare ribs ($9.99) for good measure. On the dumpling tip, we went for the pork and chives, seafood and vegetarian.

I'll tell you this right now: we ordered way too much food. What our keen eyes had failed to notice on the menu was the innocuous-looking numeral "18," which in fact turned out to refer to the number of dumplings on each plate (we were somehow under the impression that there were five or six). My favourite was probably the pork, which went well with the soy and chilli sauces on the table. The seafood dumplings were fresh tasting, with a very strong flavour that might turn off those hesitant about squid and shrimp. And the vegetarian dumplings were... well, they were unusual. Good, but weird - I'd never had a dumpling stuffed with egg, tomato and zucchini before. Sure, those are pretty mundane ingredients, but I'd never thought they'd see the inside of a dumpling before visiting Manchuria.

The lamb with cumin was the centrepiece of our meal, probably the best dish of the night. Tender strips of lamb, heavily seasoned with cumin and absolutely covered in caraway seeds, made up the bulk of the dish, along with some fried onions, and they tasted fantastic - actually reminding me of Niu Kee's beef with special seasoning, which also leans heavily on the cumin. The mushroom dish turned out to be a fairly normal sautéed vegetable dish - bamboo shoots, snow peas and broccoli - with the addition of the hydnum mushrooms. It was easy to see how these light-brown fungi got their name, with their spikey bristles. They were super-juicy and a lot chewier than your regular Chinese mushroom. The crispy pork spare ribs, excited as I was to try them, didn't really deliver though. Deep-fried and battered, they were tough, extremely fatty and a little hard to figure out. Perhaps, as my friend noted, if you'd grown up with this dish you'd be excited to find it here, but we couldn't really wrap our palates around them.

We concluded our meal with the exciting "eight precious ingredients" tea ($1.99). The server poured out the hot water from a copper pot at a distance of several feet, creating a fountain-like arc. Flavoured with rock sugar and various flowers and infusions, it was a relaxing, aesthetically pleasing end to the meal.

Manchuria Dumpling King
ADDRESS: 1441 St-Mathieu (between Ste-Catherine and de Maisonneuve)
PHONE: 935-2321
HOURS: 11 a.m.–midnight
BEST FEATURES: The copious dumplings and unusual lamb dishes
ALCOHOL: Yes
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS: One half-flight of stairs up
VEGETARIAN FRIENDLY: Yes
CREDIT CARDS: Yes
NO-SMOKING SECTION: Yes
PRICE: $10–$18 per person, before tax, booze or tip
RATING: **1/2 out of ****