
The Fun Gor (粉粿), Chiu Chow Style, at Urban China in Edmonton were pretty but not otherwise very exciting and only got a Rating of 3 out of 5.
I had these dumplings at the Urban China Restaurant in Edmonton, Alberta, where they appeared on the menu as 潮洲蒸粉粿. They were a fairly standard representation of the classic Dim Sum specialty from the town of Chaozhou (Chiu Chow) and were pretty well executed in general. The filling was a bit bland but they were very nice otherwise.
The version you see pictured above has the standard starch-based wrapper and is of a fairly common shape (although you can often find them formed as a flat, half-moon, with the pleat on the side). These ones were quite large and a little unwieldy when trying to manipulate them with chopsticks, but they held together well and didn’t fall apart.
The pork presence in the filling was a bit bland, while the coarsely chopped peanuts added some texture but little taste. Most of the flavor actually came from dried black mushroom, with a little cilantro in the back ground. The dumplings were not bad, overall, but definitely not the best ‘fun gor’ I have ever had, either.
By the way (and for those interested), the first two characters in the Chinese menu name indicate Chaozhou (or Chiu Chow, etc.) while the middle character (pronounced zhēng, in Mandarin) means ‘steamed’. The last two characters identify the dumpling type and yield the ‘Fun Gor’ pronunciation but they are actually non-standard deviations from the typical menu listing. Usually, the characters 粉果 are used for this sort of dumpling (and the pronunciation is the same) but, here, the restaurant has employed 粉粿, instead. This makes a bit of linguistic sense in that the final character translates as ‘cooked rice for making cake’, but. In usual renditions, the standard character (果) means fruit. I think, possibly, that that usage indicates either an attempt at a pun, or possibly just bad-spelling.