These Fragrant Shrimp Dumplings Tell a Family’s Story
The New York Times
At Lapis in Washington, D.C., the beloved shrimp mantoo are inspired by the chef Shamim Popal’s life and her love for Afghanistan.
The menu at Lapis, an Afghan restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., offers tongue-in-cheek introductions to each section. The soups are “guaranteed to win over your Afghan mother-in-law (or find you one),” the signature dishes are “as formidable as Afghanistan’s mighty mountain ranges.” And the Afghan dumplings are presented with a simple phrase: “Yes, they exist.”
Among the aushak and mantoo (sometimes spelled mantu), the most popular dumpling is a comforting shrimp-filled version in a saffron cream sauce. Afghan mantoo are often filled with soft-cooked leeks (or onions) and ground beef while aushak are stuffed with the leeks and topped with the ground meat. But Lapis’s shrimp iteration is the product of the chef Shamim Popal’s journey from Afghanistan to the United States.
Pictures of the Popal family, the owners of Lapis, line the walls of the restaurant’s homey interior: formal seated portraits and photos of weddings, dinner parties and newborn babies all function as a time capsule of what life was like before the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979.
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