A food writer uses math to pick out the best dumplings in Shanghai

Christopher St. Cavish has made a name for himself in China thanks to his unconventional food-writing method. The “dumpling index” is one of the most original — and nerdiest — ways to judge the popular food’s quality.

He’s taken the Shanghai dumpling, a delicacy consisting of a thin wrapper encasing a pork meatball and soup, and established a formula to determine the skill behind its construction.

Armed with a digital scale and a set of calipers, St. Cavish has toured the Chinese city’s best dumplings restaurants to test his method. With these tools, he measures the optimal ratio of soup, to thickness of the skin, to volume of the meat. Now, his list of Shanghai’s best-engineered dumplings — designated “class A” — is getting lots of traction.

When asked about the reactions to his “nerding out” in restaurants, the writer laughed: “As a foreigner in China, oftentimes you get a pass for whatever behavior looks weird is just considered to be normal.”

But St. Cavish’s project is more than just a crazy idea. “In my writing, I’m very guilty of being highly subjective,” the former cook recognizes. “And I thought, what would happen if I took myself completely out of the picture, if I was looking for completely objective writing, if it didn’t rely on my opinions, it didn’t rely on my experience.”

The result? This in-depth mathematical analysis of the engineering behind dumpling construction.

St. Cavish is well aware of the oddity behind his dumpling index. “On the one hand, the index that I’ve done is completely useless because it doesn’t mention anything about taste. Nobody thinks to themselves, ‘where am I going to go for dumplings today? Let’s find the one with the best engineering!’” But, he adds, the project has the benefit of providing a foolproof measure of a restaurant’s technical ability.

He was pleasantly surprised by the reactions. “It’s been a fantastic response in China, way more than I ever expected.” Several newspapers in Shanghai have lauded his method as the way forward for food, even suggesting that it should be standardized.

So what’s next for this method? “It requires food that a major part of what makes it good is a ratio, ” St. Cavish explains. “And the only thing that I can think of in the Western world (…) is a hamburger.”

Keep an eye out for the food writer in your local burger joint!