Eric Jiang appears to be toeing the line between dynamic chef and unhinged restaurateur. Since moving to Orlando from Syracuse, the man opened Sushi Izuki, a star-chasing omakase joint in O-Town West last summer, and then, a couple of months ago, his downtown dumpling spot Jiang’s Kitchen. But he and his wife, Miaozhen Zhang, will also open Fan Hwa, a tong sui (dessert soup) and bao house, on North Mills Avenue next month, followed by another Jiang’s Kitchen on Millenia Plaza Way in December and a noodle-focused Jiang’s Kitchen on East Colonial Drive in January. There’s another Jiang’s Kitchen being planned for the Fairbanks Crossing development in Winter Park and two more in upstate New York and, oh, did I mention he’s developing a Japanese live-eel restaurant centered around charcoal grilling?
No, I didn’t, but point is, it’s easy to see why he and his better half have been running on fumes of late.
“We got two hours of sleep for a couple of weeks when we opened Jiang’s,” he says about their wabi-sabi’ed wrapper’s delight of a restaurant. When I see the pair for the first time, they’re inside a glowing glass box rolling out dough, scooping in the fillings, folding and pinching 18-20 creases into every flawlessly constructed, 31-gram, chicken-broth soup dumpling. And perfect they are. The skins are as smooth as a Buddhist monk’s bald head, only considerably more delicious (just trust me on that one). That gelatinized, three-hour broth renders clean when slurped from a pierced pearly pocket filled with beef ($14), crabmeat and pork ($14), or truffle and pork ($16), the undeniable star of Jiang’s soup dumpling affair and the one that most closely mimicked the inviolable pouches served at the globally lauded Din Tai Fung…