Nancy Loo’s Dumpling Diplomacy builds community around making and sharing food. Photo: Andy Foster
It’s not your typical Montclair eatery, but at lunchtime on a recent Thursday, the Pay-It-Forward Pop-Up Café was as buzzy as the most bougie restaurant in town. People mingled as they lined up for helpings of thick, creamy chicken soup, homemade bread and miniature apple pies in the sunny Salvation Army cafeteria. Businesspeople sat next to senior citizens; a former mayor and town attorney were there, along with a group of noisy kindergartners, the woman who runs the local tutoring nonprofit, and clients who use Salvation Army services.
Conspicuously absent was a cash register. After filling their plates, some just walked away; others scanned a QR code to make a donation to Salvation Army programs, including a homeless shelter, soup kitchen and case-management services.
The monthly café was founded by former physicist Nancy Loo, who runs a business called Dumpling Diplomacy, which brings people together to build community by making and sharing food, with the aim of bridging differences and fighting hunger. (The company is not a nonprofit, but a “benefit corporation,” whose business goals include having a positive impact on society.)
In addition to the monthly café, Loo hosts a monthly dumpling-making workshop, called Dumpling Day of Service, at Toni’s Kitchen, the local soup kitchen. Teams of 8 to 10 volunteers shape, boil and fry 500 dumplings, which are boxed and labelled with hand-drawn cards and donated to people living with food insecurity.
“Our aim is to bring people together across all divides using food as a universal language,” says Loo. “The idea is that folks who have very little in common can create something in common by working together on an activity that no one knows how to do. We have a lot of families coming in to volunteer, and organizations where there are different groups, different cultures that don’t get along, or where they need to have difficult conversations.”
The company’s reach is growing. Loo now teaches dumpling making at schools, temples, churches, charitable organizations and companies, in towns such as South Orange and Maplewood, after which groups eat together.
They’ve started a new arrivals program at Toni’s Kitchen for Spanish speakers who are losing touch with their English-speaking kids, and they’ve hosted discussions for the Montclair Library’s Big Read about a graphic novel called The Best We Could Do, which tells the story of a Vietnamese refugee, and a movie, Nailed It, about Vietnamese nail salons.
The germ of the idea for Dumpling Diplomacy came during the pandemic, when Loo started volunteering at Toni’s Kitchen and was struck by how many were struggling with food insecurity. “The need was so great that food was stacked floor to ceiling in their huge dining room,” she says. It wasn’t confined to certain areas of town, either. “Making deliveries, I realized that hunger was all around us.”
Eager to find a way to contribute, she decided to host dumpling-making sessions at Toni’s. They became so popular that people began complaining that they kept getting closed out. Dumpling Diplomacy was born.
“These events have a great equalizing effect; guests who normally wouldn’t interact have a chance to meet,” she says.
The partnership with the Salvation Army has been a boon for both. All the proceeds for the Pay-It-Forward Café go to Salvation Army programs, which include shelter and meal programs, social work services, and youth programming. It is staffed by volunteers, including culinary students from the Essex County Schools of Technology in Newark. And it’s become so popular that many people put their orders in ahead of time on the Dumpling Diplomacy website, in case they run out of certain items.
The café exemplifies the Dumpling Diplomacy mission of bringing all members of the commuter together “in the same place, on equal footing,” Loo says. “Everybody eats the same food, but they have a choice about what they get to eat, which the homeless don’t often get to do.” The café also brings attention and volunteers to the Salvation Army.
Says the pastor of the Salvation Army’s Montclair Corps, Carl Avery, “It’s a diverse group that comes in; people who wouldn’t necessarily meet find out what’s going on with other people around them.”
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