Chicago Magazine Fact Checkers, Where Are You?

Reading the current (June) issue, and on page 42 in the Budget Beat section Joanne Trestrail is raving about Chinatown newcomer Tao Ran Ju at 2002 S. Wentworth -- which may indeed be excellent, but my jaw dropped at "This is also the only place in town we know of that offers soup dumplings--not soup with dumplings in it, but dumplings with soup in them." Hey, Joanne, I can name other places and I would guess most of the people on LTH as well. Glad you liked them, but hold the astonishment.
>>Brent

Brent,

Since you are treating this as an open letter to them, why not offer them some advice on where to go?

Regards,

An easy one: Moon Palace.

why not offer them some advice on where to go?

Hi, Cathy -- I assume you're talking about the informational interpretation of the phrase and not where my warped mind went first, so I'd add to any Xiao Long Bao list:

Ed's Potsticker House
Lao Shanghai
Moon Palace

-- and there may be more, but those have been our three faves until now. (We WILL try Tao Ran Ju in the near future.)

As often, my reading is informed by the knowledge that since many Chicago food writers are part of the LTH hive, some definitive journalistic statements on food may be conscious or even sub-conscious manifestations of prevailing consensus here. This is to say, since "we" seem to believe that all soup dumplings in Chicago suck instead of Tao Ran Ju, some external research might not make it past this perception.

Of course, I allow that empirically, all soup dumplings might suck or escape public notice except Tao Ran Ju, and that there are independent journalists conducting original research themselves and drawing their own conclusions. Certainly, many published articles come to entirely different recommendations than would be culled from our posts, and we certainly let the authors know.

An odd and amusing offshoot is that it is actually de rigueur now to chase items or places NOT covered on LTH, offer alternatives, and then Tweet about them or create posts here stating "I'm surprised this has not been covered here before," or "in an effort to expand our index," essentially acknowledging the gravity well. I read and value these posts, but I've never been sure why the burden of replicating the totality of culinary or civic knowledge is often placed on this site. Ironically, I may be contributing to that here.

I would therefore be equally unsurprised by the article's oversight having nothing to do with LTH, or everything to do with LTH, but wanted to point out the possibility of the latter, especially if the Chicago Magazine statement is read as "these are the only dumplings we know that have actual soup in them, instead of just the promise of soup in them."