Ian McNulty: Dim sum by the airport exit at Yummy House in Kenner

Dim sum will always get my attention. The prospect of a meal progressing through many different types of dumplings and small bamboo trays, each revealing another shareable clutch of traditional Chinese flavors, is something I will always seek out.

And so, whenever I’m waiting at a certain traffic signal in Kenner, my mind will wander to the delicate har gow shrimp dumplings, the long, broad rice noodles heaped with beef short ribs and the crisp salt and pepper squid at Yummy House.

Yummy House has been a bit of an enigma by the highway exit, the one that for now serves as the inauspicious front door to the New Orleans airport, awaiting the completion of the flyover that might someday connect the new terminal to the interstate.

I noticed it earlier in the year, while scanning the strip malls for what might be new for food around the orbit of the airport. But I could never seem to catch Yummy House open until the summer.

It turns out the restaurant underwent a change in ownership and took some time to get rolling again. Sharing a strip mall with a few chain restaurants and storefronts, this is a large, bright restaurant with booths and big round tables that looks like it’s ready to host a banquet (though there’s no liquor license yet). Note that this place has no relation to the similar-sounding Yummy Yummy, a Mid-City Chinese restaurant memorable for its name and really nothing else.

Yummy House is now run by the Liu family, and they are serving an impressively broad array of both dim sum and more substantial dishes from a lengthy menu. Or, make that “menus.”

It still leads with a familiar roster of American Chinese dishes, which are not bad, but nothing to plan a special trip around.

It is the dim sum and a selective, deeper dive into the hardbound traditional menu that makes it destination-worthy.

Dumpling detour

Yummy House initially deployed dim sum carts, roving from table to table laden with dishes ready to serve. This sounds enticing, and it is an ideal form of dim sum in areas with a robust market for this style of dining. But Yummy House did not debut with the volume for this to work, and the carts have been sidelined.

Now you order from a menu with terse descriptions in English, Chinese and Vietnamese and also (helpfully) photo illustrations of each dim sum dish.

One visit brought a smattering of types - the pork-studded, toasty-edged taro cakes followed by eggplant slices stuffed with minced shrimp followed by sweet, bready buns filled with barbecue pork.

One another visit I undertook a self-guided a tour of dumplings, which offer good variety across the spread of types. For instance, dumplings filled with shrimp and pea shoots had a rustic quality compared to the much more elegant chive dumplings, which taste like a bite of spring captured in a dumpling noodle.

The shumai erupt from their thin noodle wrappers like flower buds just peeling open. And the best dumplings I had of them all here were the har gow, shrimp dumplings, for the elegant intricacy of the nearly translucent exterior, patterned like scallop shells, holding coarsely chopped sweet shrimp inside, just waiting for a dot of hot chili oil.

Dishes that could ostensibly be vegetarian, of course, are just more vehicles for meat, like the bean curd skin roll, which brings thin sheets of tofu skin, sour to the point of tasting fermented, bundled around a mix of pork and shrimp shot through with black mushrooms and bamboo shoots.

Deeper dives and doozies

The menu beyond dim sum is lengthy, the type that always makes me wonder how a kitchen can field all of it. The answer at Yummy House is that it doesn’t (the clams with chili and black bean sauce sound right up my alley but haven’t been available on my visits) and that it has its share of doozies (avoid the shrimp with mint leaf sauce, which was a murky, muddled gel-like mess).

But I found a lot to like here in a sampling of dishes that seemed to leap off the menu. That’s how I got to the Cantonese lobster, a worthy centerpiece. It’s hacked into chunks and then rearranged more or less into its original form, from head to tail, with a slightly sweet ginger and green onion sauce soaking into its meaty pieces.

I also like the kitchen’s way with salt and pepper dishes, meaning seafood with a light batter and plenty of black pepper. The squid is a good showing for the style, with a bounce left in the seafood, a batter that leaves some of it bare for textural contrast and a strong dose of pepper.

Beyond the multiple printed menus there’s also a specials board, which is where I found soup dumplings, a feat of ephemeral engineering that encase broth in the supple noodle.

This is a good time for dim sum lovers in New Orleans, the best I’ve seen. Dian Xin has two locations, and so does Wishing Town Bakery Café, each with their own specialties and styles. Panda King Fine Dining is keeping the weekend dim sum going on the west bank (complete with carts). And soon Shirley and Tang Lee, the longtime former owners of Royal China, will open their new Magazine Street restaurant with dim sum as the focus.

In Kenner, when I’m at that airport traffic signal, wondering when the flyover will ever take off, I like knowing I could always pull in to Yummy House and assemble a table full of dumplings. It's almost enough to get one rooting for a flight delay.

Yummy House

3000 Loyola Dr., (504) 470-2898

Daily 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. Fri., Sat.)

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