The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. In our weekly column The $25 Diner, we hunt down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.

On a chilly day, you can practically see the steam rising from Taraval Street, ground zero for dumplings in our increasingly dumplingfied city. The Parkside drag is home to Kingdom of Dumpling, the OG that opened in 2007, where I trained my then-very-small kids with tiny stomachs how to down a good dozen each — a rite of passage for tiny San Franciscans. There are also Dumpling Specialist and Dumpling Kitchen, which specialize in exactly what you’d think.

But then there’s Happy Family Gourmet, which offers a variety of dough-based offerings, perfect for inducing a carb coma. HFG has the usual exhaustive menu of more than 20 boiled dumplings — filled with everything from Spanish mackerel ($11.95) to West Lake mutton ($11.95) — all expertly rolled out by hand by owner Wang Shubo, who makes more than 2,000 a day in a glassed-in closet of a space lined with red and gold signs for good fortune. The restaurant opened in 2009, a year before Instagram launched, but Wang must have had some kind of premonition about camera-eats-first geeks like me who, mesmerized by her dumpling making, can’t help but whip out their phones to take a video.

Wang, who is from the Shandong province, ran a restaurant in Xinjiang, in the northwest of China, before she and her husband Zhensheng Xu immigrated to the U.S. right before they opened the restaurant. Xu spends five hours a day making the complicated liangpi, or “cold-skin noodles” ($10.45) — a springy mixture of flour and water that’s steamed then sliced — is a specialty of this region and a deserved specialty of HFG. The chewy wide noodles alone, served cold and tossed with garlic, chile oil, sesame oil, and cucumbers, are worth the trip.

But it is December, and you’re also going to want something warming. Which means, yes, an order of sear-your-mouth-hot dumplings, or maybe chive pancakes, but also mild and comforting shepherd’s purse pork wonton noodle soup ($11.95), made with pleasantly rubbery wood ear mushrooms and chunky bok choy. The clean broth is even better buoyed with a dash or two of chile sauce and black vinegar.

Be warned that the hand-pulled noodles will be longer than even your tallest dining companion’s exceedingly long arm, and if you’re sharing, I challenge you to transfer them gracefully, without losing half to the table. (When I ask Wang for a noodle-eating tip, she suggests using scissors, which are not offered to guests. So, at the risk of appearing to brandish a weapon, BYO kitchen shears.)

On the non-dough side of the long menu, there are items that some might consider adventurous: a crunchy, cold pig-ear salad with cucumber ($10.95), plus a popular dish of braised pig’s feet in brown sauce and a lost-in-english-translation item, “cattle miscellaneous surface.” If you’re looking for something green, there are the ubiquitous but always delicious dry-fried green beans or cucumbers with peanuts.

But the real bonus comes at the end. Before leaving, grab a four-pack of housemade bing ($15) to bring home. The soft, lightly griddled flatbread is stuffed with a variety of meats or comes with garlic, chives, and bits of scrambled egg and is the flavor that I loved most. At home, I heated one in the microwave, then threw it in the toaster oven to crisp up. With coffee, it made a great breakfast.

The Standard recommends:
Sharing is the best (and thriftiest) way to dine here. While the below generously serves two, it could almost be enough food for three.

Xi’an hemp sauce cold skin noodles $10.45
Shepherd’s purse wonton noodle soup $11.95
Dry-sauteed green beans $12.95
Two egg-and-chive bing $8

Total: $43.35 for two