Serious Dim Sum Comes to Colorado
Colorado Springs' relationship with Chinese cuisine has historically been adequate where it needed to be exceptional, and Nana's Dim Sum & Dumplings arrived to correct the imbalance. The restaurant on Democracy Point is the city's only venue where dim sum receives the serious treatment it deserves: hand-formed dumplings, properly steamed bao, and xiao long bao. Shanghai's famous soup dumplings. Executed with the attention to the broth-within-the-dumpling that separates the genuine article from approximations.
The xiao long bao is the flagship. Getting the soup inside a sealed dumpling to remain liquid through the steaming process, while ensuring the wrapper is thin enough to yield without breaking at the point of eating, requires a skill that most kitchens outside major Chinese-American urban centres never develop. Nana's has developed it, which places the restaurant in a category of one within Colorado Springs and a category of few within Colorado itself.
The pan-fried dumplings arrive at the table with the bottom crust that the Chinese preparation requires. A single unified disc of crisp pastry across all the dumplings in a batch, achieved by the careful reduction of water in the pan at the final stage of cooking. The fried shrimp preparations are properly done; the crab rangoon, frequently a diminished restaurant version of itself in American Chinese cooking, arrives here with actual crab content and a cream cheese filling that has been handled rather than simply applied.
The Sharing Format
Dim sum is inherently communal. Ordered in rounds, placed at the centre of the table, eaten from shared plates with the understanding that the meal belongs to everyone and the best approach is to try everything. For team dinners, this format removes the social friction of individual ordering and replaces it with the shared experience of a meal that moves at a pace set by the table's appetite and conversation rather than the kitchen's sequence. Order broadly. The staff understands pacing and will guide order placement for large groups.
Nana's is part of a Colorado-based group with strong roots in Denver, and the Colorado Springs location maintains the parent operation's commitment to quality ingredients and careful preparation. The neighbourhood is north of downtown. Plan for transport. But the commute is entirely worthwhile for dim sum of this standard in a city where the alternative is driving to Denver.
Value
At $25-$45 per person for a sharing format that leaves the table satisfied, Nana's represents the kind of value that the dim sum format has always made possible when the quality justifies the comparison: more dishes, more flavours, more conversation, for less per person than any comparable serious restaurant in the city. For team dinners of twelve, the per-person spend is lower still, and the experience of communal eating scales with group size in a way that private dining rooms simply cannot replicate.