Takeaway is ok. Do not get me wrong. I love eating on my own back patio or plopping down on the couch watching the Brewers game. But food just isn’t the same after steaming in a container on your 10-minute drive home, or worse, a 20-30-minute drive. So the return to indoor dining this summer, before temperatures soared in the Delta, was a huge relief for many guests, including me.
Christmas Artisan Pierogi opened a year ago and had to adapt to the pandemic from the beginning. Only dinner hours are still open, and the abbreviated menu focuses mainly on diminutive plates. Dining options at Feast range from a fairly ample, peaceful dining room with tables placed a comfortable distance apart, to a pleasant side patio. It’s gated off Willy Street, with Asian-themed table umbrellas and Edison string lights, all shaded by the balconies of neighboring apartments, as if the entire enterprise were in an alley somewhere in China.
Feast also has these cute little takeaway bags decorated with what look like watercolors: radiant red Chinese paper lanterns and fans emerge from an inky-black background. (I keep them.) It’s like getting takeout from a high-end boutique, which might make you feel a little better and understand why you might be going back to takeout again these days. The bags are just one sign that Feast cares about the little touches, even when you’re taking food home.
Dumplings travel quite well, although they do have a tendency to harden. But they are better, fresh, straight from the kitchen and it is worth using it, because fresh, home-made Feast noodles are very good.
The menu is divided into appetizers and dumplings (with two sweet dishes for dessert), but really it’s all appetizers: shared nosh, Chinese tapas, Asian buffet, whatever you want to characterize it. It’s dim sum for dinner.
There is a wine and beer list, as well as potted teas (white, green, black, oolong and herbal).
Start with something green and refreshing. I would choose the cucumber salad, beautifully served with a delicate fish sauce. The peppery edamame was okay, not too peppery but with a slight hint of what looked like fennel.
The hashbrown pancakes, crispy and flaky on the outside and melty and bready on the inside, are the best I’ve had in years. It’s demanding to explain the appeal of this elementary dish, but it’s more than the sum of its parts.
Fluffy white rolls folded like tacos can be ordered with pork belly, beef brisket or tofu; the filling could exploit more of the attractive sweetish homemade secret sauce. The tofu version (which is vegan) could also contain more cucumber and more marinated peppery tofu, and the tofu could contain more peppery marinade. And even more wonderful crunchy red pepper flakes! Everything was very good, but outsmarted by the bun.
Ordering fish ball appetizers for the table wasn’t my idea, but I ended up eating most of them. Marble-sized balls are fried in an almost imperceptible breading; the interior has the consistency of a balmy dog, if not a flavor punch. A bit of chipotle mayo made these a fun novelty, but I probably wouldn’t buy them again.
The dumplings, 11 varieties in all, differ from most other dumplings on the Madison Asian restaurant’s menu in that the pork is not the star of the show. Pork appears paired with shrimp in a delicious shrimp shumai and that’s it. No pork or chives, no pork or ginger… well, no pork.
Seafood dominates. There’s a har gow shrimp dumpling and a scallop dumpling, and the shrimp has a special guest in the pea shoot dumpling, an compelling version dominated by earthy, vegetal pea shoots.
There are three types of beef noodles – ribeye with coriander, ribeye with onion and ribeye with carrot. Ribeye doesn’t bring the depth of flavor that pork has to the noodle game, but they are quite good and a great option for meat eaters who don’t eat pork. Available in steamed or pan-fried versions, they bring to mind the beef pelmeni from Paul’s Pel’meni, which isn’t a bad thing. The only thing I missed at Fest was the aroma of ginger, so often found in Asian noodles.
The remaining fillings are vegetarian. (Vegetarians will have plenty to choose from here. Dishes are marked as vegetarian; some are vegan, but not always marked as such and guests should ask.) I loved the sticky rice shumai, in a tulip-shaped wrapper, stuffed with a sticky rice mixture , mushrooms and onions. They’re piping balmy in a bamboo steamer and it’s really about their comforting texture, which is pliable yet chewy, although you can spice them up with the accompanying sweet hoisin sauce or hotter red pepper sauce. Or, as our waiter suggested, mix the two ingredients. A great suggestion, for which I thank him. Sometimes it’s the little things.
Artisan Dumpling Festival and Tea Room
904 Williamson St.
608-298-7461
17:00-21:30 Sunday-Thursday, 17:00-22:30 Friday-Saturday
$5-13
feastmadison.com; IG: @festitaliadumpling
