Gyozas and kombucha

One of the best discoveries of our recent weekend in Bridport in Dorset was a brilliant small restaurant called Dorshi. You might easily miss it as it’s down an alley off the high street but seek it out. (The alleyway is just to the side of The Bull hotel)

The Asian-inspired menu is in two parts - dumplings and what they rather nicely refer to as ‘not dumplings’ - but their speciality is gyozas with different types of filling. Being unable to decide we went for the tasting plate but all went really well with Real Kombucha’s Royal Flush I’d ordered, rightly anticipating a bit of a boozy evening watching England play Ukraine.

Kombucha, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a non-alcoholic fermented tea and Royal Flush is made with first flush Darjeeling. It’s carbonated so tastes like a sparkling wine though with a fruitier, slightly peachy flavour in the case of the Royal Flush (some kombuchas are flavoured with other ingredients like ginger and lemon). You can buy it in Waitrose for £8 a litre bottle or direct from their website for £48 a pack of six. Or even from Amazon which has the smaller bottles.

Anyway it’s a great option in a restaurant whether they have dumplings or not.

Dumplings and grand cru Chablis

You might think dumplings were humble fare, not best suited to show off a great wine but as last week’s tasting lunch at Bob Bob Ricard proved, that’s not necessarily the case.

They laid on two from their largely Russian-inspired dinner menu - some lobster, crab and shrimp pelmeni which were served with a langoustine bisque and truffle, potato and mushroom vareniki (above) which came with a forest mushroom velouté.

Both were spectacularly good with a mature 2016 grand cru Chablis ‘Les Clos’ from Domaine Christian Moreau which sells for £100 on the list.

Of course it wasn’t the dumplings themselves that were the key to the match but the umami-rich fillings and soups in which they were served - shellfish on the one hand and mushrooms and truffles on the other.

And although the wine itself was expensive, at £10 for the mushroom dumplings and £14 for the loster ones, the dumplings are quite affordable.

Since wine is a feature of the restaurant it’s good to see a menu that’s designed to show it off.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Bob Bob Ricard who obligingly supplied the very professional photos given that mine were a bit rubbish and wouldn't have encouraged you to try the combination out at all.

Toulouse sausage and prawn dumplings with sweet chilli sauce and Thierry Puzelat gamay

A pretty wild combination this week at a lovely wine bar, Magnum, we went to in Toulouse on Saturday night. The owner Jérôme’s wife, who originally came from Réunion, had made Chinese-style dumplings with the local Toulouse sausage and prawns served with a sweet chili sauce. Not the kind of thing I would normally go for but he sold it so persuasively we had to give it a go and it was fantastic.

What on earth would work with that? Surely a white? Well turned out to be a red as it happened - an 11% gamay called Vin Rouge from natural wine producer Thierry Puzelat which was labelled a vin de France. It was fresh, it was light, it had no discernible tannins but plenty of flavour. It showed off all the flavours of the dumplings without losing its own. It also went equally improbably well with another excellent dish of potato pancakes topped with lumpfish roe served with a lemon cream sauce.

I’d forgotten how good gamay was with Chinese and Chinese-inspired food - a useful tip to remember for the Chinese new year next week.