Takeout dumpling prices across our city guides, by category

What this is

Each city guide quotes a few menu prices per restaurant, names the page each price came from and shows the date it was read. This page keeps only the prices listed on an online ordering channel, groups them by dumpling category and compares the medians across cities.

The unit is one listed price for a standard order: a menu line that names the dish and prints a fixed amount. Starting prices with a trailing plus, size-tier legends, combos and the category variants the index excludes are left out, using the same rule as the dumpling price index chart.

Nothing here is a quote, an estimate or a delivered total. We did not place orders, and the amounts exclude tax, tip, service charges and delivery fees.

This is a dataset view, not a ranking. City rows are alphabetical. A city appears only when at least two of the three categories hold at least two takeout orders, and a cell below that bar is left blank rather than filled with a single price.

National medians by category

Pooled across every city guide in the index: 585 standard takeout orders from 290 restaurants in 147 cities.

Soup dumplings carry the most takeout rows (266), listed from $3.99 to $48.99. Har gow is the thinnest of the three: 128 orders in 91 cities, against 191 orders in 110 for siu mai, so its median rests on 121 restaurants.

Channel mix. 568 of the 585 orders (97.1%) come from a restaurant’s own or linked online ordering; 17 (2.9%) come from a third-party ordering page. Both are takeout prices, but a platform menu can carry its own markup, so the split is reported instead of blended silently. No price is adjusted from one channel to the other.

Of the 851 listed prices in the index, 166 are outside the standard-order rule and 100 more are standard prices read from a menu page or a dine-in list. Neither group is a takeout price, and neither appears in any number here.

By city and category

36 cities have at least two takeout orders in at least two of the three categories. Each cell gives the city’s median listed price and the number of orders behind it (n). A blank cell means fewer than two orders in that category, not a withheld price.

The table holds 262 orders in 85 cells. The other 323 orders are not in it: 305 sit in 111 cities that clear the two-order bar in only one category, and 18 sit in a single-order cell of a city that does appear.

Cell sizes are small: the median cell holds 3 orders and the largest holds 9. One menu change can move a two-order median, so read a row as what these orders showed, not as what the city charges.

Inside these 36 rows, soup dumpling medians run from $6.95 (Schaumburg, n = 7) to $17.00 (Glendale, n = 3); har gow medians run from $5.75 (Pembroke Pines, n = 2) to $12.98 (Burlingame, n = 2); siu mai medians run from $5.75 (Pembroke Pines, n = 2) to $12.50 (McKinney, n = 2). The spread describes these menus; it is not a quality score.

Methodology

• Source rows: one row per listed price in src/data/price-observations.ts, joined to its city-guide restaurant record. The record supplies the restaurant name, the profile link and the check date; nothing here is typed in from memory.
• Takeout channels only: operator-online (the restaurant’s own or linked online ordering) and third-party (a checked platform listing). operator-menu — a menu web page, PDF or image read without an ordering path — and dine-in are excluded, because a dine-in list price is not a takeout price.
• Standard orders only: the isStandard rule the price index chart uses. It drops starting prices printed with a trailing plus, and the named variants outside the standard comparison: crab, truffle, pan-fried, assortment, combo and sheng jian for soup dumplings; sticky rice, beef, fried, truffle and caviar for siu mai; plus any row the index excludes by name.
• Two-order bar: a city needs at least two orders in a category to show a median there, and at least two categories to be a row. Cities that clear the bar once are left out of the table rather than padded with a one-price cell.
• Median: the middle amount, averaging the two middle amounts on an even count and rounding to cents. No weighting, no inflation adjustment and no currency conversion.
• Dates: each order carries the date its restaurant record was checked, October 1 to November 5, 2026. Every order from one restaurant shares that date. The page’s dateModified is the newest date in the pool.
• Reproduce it: the rows and the free CSV are on the price index page, where the data is published under CC BY 4.0. This page computes its medians from the same records at build time, and tests/takeout-prices-by-city.test.ts pins the counts.

Limitations

• Small samples. The median cell holds 3 orders. A city row is a reading of a handful of menus, not a market price.
• Editorial shortlists, not a census. The restaurants come from our city guides, chosen for distinct menus and current operator evidence. They are not a random sample of every Chinese restaurant in a city, and the pool covers 147 of the 159 city guides that carry a price in the index.
• Not a delivered total. Menus change, and tax, tip, service charges, delivery fees and minimums sit outside these amounts. A third-party listing price can already include that platform’s own markup, and operator online prices can differ between pickup and delivery views.
• Order sizes differ. Medians compare order prices; where a menu states a piece count, that count can differ between restaurants. A lower median can be a smaller order.
• One channel dominates. 97.1% of the orders come from operator online ordering, so the comparison mostly describes that channel, not third-party apps.
• Thin categories. Har gow clears the two-order bar in 24 cities before the two-category rule, against 69 for soup dumplings. A city with no har gow row may still sell it.
• No regional price adjustment. These are menu amounts, not local purchasing power, and they are not weighted by city size or order volume.