Katy's Dumpling House Comes to Oak Park

Katy's Dumpling House is a legendary noodle joint in Westmont and, more recently, Naperville. For the past six years or so, marvelous experiences have been recorded by members of LTHForum.com, the Chicago-based culinary chat site I co-founded and now co-moderate.

Noodles can be found everywhere, but a good noodle is not so easy to find, and Katy's has been turning out some of the best noodles in our part of the world for several years now.

Katy's menu items are now available in the Hutong space, which I understand will also continue to serve from the regular Hutong menu, which I'd always liked just fine.

While there's still a chill in the air, I'd recommend a bowl of pork belly with pickled cabbage and noodles soup from the Katy's menu. The noodles in this delicate broth are truly a thing of beauty, lightly curled strings of hand-pulled tenderness, sparkling with ginger. The rich pork belly is nicely balanced by pickled cabbage, yet it still cries out for some hot sauce; if you ask, the server will give you a small container of pepper flakes in oil – this heat perks up what can be a mild soup, though for many it's probably just fine as served.

My understanding is that Katy's is renting space in Hutong, but apparently the dumpling house has enough power to push the old name Hutong off exterior signage to make way for its own. Currently, Katy's menus are printed out and taped to the walls near the register – our guess is that it will, soon, have its own place on the printed menu and, perhaps, an entire menu all its own.