Texas’ first Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, a restaurant for the TikTok generation, opens May 15

Fast-talking New York restaurateur Stratis Morfogen expects to open 50 to 100 Brooklyn Dumpling Shops nationwide in the next six years. The first one in Texas will be operated by franchisee Sam Cole and is planned for a May 15, 2023 debut in Deep Ellum.

Restaurant creator Morfogen already has a 25,000-square-foot restaurant named Brooklyn Chop House in Times Square. His more casual Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is a 24/7 destination where customers can be “in and out in 10 seconds” with a bag of pepperoni pizza dumplings, French onion soup dumplings and Philly cheesesteak egg rolls, he said in a 2022 interview with The Dallas Morning News.

The restaurant — which requires little to no human interaction on the part of the customer — is “absolutely speaking to the TikTok generation,” Morfogen said.

Dallas will be the sixth Brooklyn Dumpling Shop in the U.S., and the founder expects to open 10 to 15 by the end of 2023. That’s a quick expansion after the first one debuted in May 2021 in New York City.

Dallas franchisee Sam Cole expects to stir up at least six more in Dallas-Fort Worth within a few years.

“We chose Dallas because I’ve lived here for close to 20 years, and it’s a great market for national brands to expand,” Cole says in a statement. He says Deep Ellum has a strong mix of local residents, lunchtime office workers and “late-night partygoers.”

Each Brooklyn Dumpling Shop has 3.2 employees, Morfogen said cryptically: one cook, one expediter, one greeter and one manager. The manager can work full-time at five stores at once, which is why Morfogen counts that role as 0.2 of each store.

Orders made in advance will be placed in a locker, accessed with a smartphone. Older folks who choose to place an order in-person can do so at self-service kiosks. But that’s not the way anyone under 35 is ordering, Morfogen said.

“I believe self-ordering kiosks are going to go the way of the fax machine very quickly,” he said.

Morfogen knows what people will say about this relatively faceless place that prides itself on “zero interaction.” He’s already been accused of being “a yuppie [expletive] stealing jobs.”

“Are you the same person who got upset when the tollbooths were removed from the highways? How are you feeling now … going 30 mph without stopping?” he asked rhetorically.

Morfogen thinks that embracing technology — and removing humans from jobs that can be done by computers and smartphones — could save the restaurant industry.

And if you don’t believe him? He doesn’t care. He was so sure of the business model that he made plans to license 15 locations of the restaurant before the first Brooklyn Dumpling Shop even opened.

The business is based off a laser-focused culinary approach, that consumers want to eat dumplings filled with their favorite sandwich ingredients — and that they’ll want to be able to get them around the clock, fast.

The chicken parmesan dumpling and the peanut butter and jelly dumpling are best-sellers, Morfogen said.

Yes, he’s thinking what we’re thinking.

“It’s great drunk food. I’m not going to sugar coat it,” he said.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is expected to open at 2548 Elm St., Dallas, on May 15, 2023.

Original story published Aug. 11, 2022 and updated May 9, 2023.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.