New York Dumpling Automat Brings French Onion Soup Dumplings to Austin

Five locations of a dumpling automat are coming soon to Austin thanks to New York-based franchise Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. The first location will be found at 1407 East Fifth Street, Suite 201 in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood opening sometime in 2023, as reported by Austin Business Journal.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop serves many kinds of typical and untraditional dumplings flavors, with each shop able to create its own city-specific dumplings. Options in the New York shop include pork, seafood, cheeseburger (as well as a vegetarian option with Impossible burger), French onion soup dumplings, and lamb gyro with tzatziki. There are also croissant-shaped breakfast dumplings called “breakfast cro’sumplings” in flavors like bacon, egg, and cheese. The automat also serves crispy wontons, spring rolls, waffle fries, coleslaw, and desserts like crispy Nutella drops. To drink, there’s coffee, tea, sodas, beer, and wine.

Automats were a popular form of dining in the early 1900s, wherein diners would retrieve their order from cubbies and dine in a dining room, keeping the kitchen invisible. The owner of Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, Stratis Morfogen, applied a modern twist to the concept to make the restaurant contact-free. Guests order online or at a digital kiosk, and scan a bar code to retrieve their items from temperature-controlled lockers, before taking a seat in the dining room. (Actual humans are making the dumplings.)

The first Brooklyn Dumpling Shop opened in East Village in New York in May. Morfogen, who has written a book on dumplings, partnered with Fransmart (Five Guys, Halal Guys) to franchise the store, and Alex Liebert will be the Texas franchisee. Brooklyn Dumpling shop is expanding nationwide, including Dallas.

Daniel Kwak

Update, Tuesday, September 27, 2022, 10:09 a.m.: This article, originally published on September 8, 2021, was updated to clarify location-specific flavors and Brooklyn Dumpling Shop’s first Austin address.