A tale of two lower East Sides unfolded recently on the corner of Allen and Delancey Streets. It all began four months ago, when two twentysomethings recently sprung from cooking school and inspired by a jaunt through the Italian countryside opened Sorella, a stylish Piedmontese wine bar with a façade that rivals Momofuku Ko in its studied inscrutability. Then, earlier this month, Sorella’s venerable neighbor, the cheap-eats mecca Fried Dumpling, shut its doors for good. Social critics and dumpling devotees might link these two events, forging some socio-culinary moral about the evils of gentrification, but the Underground Gourmet—no stranger to the greasy charms of five-for-a-dollar pork-and-chive potstickers—is a bit more conflicted. For one thing, although the loss of a good dumpling dive is a cause for concern, there is a small measure of comfort in the fact that commensurate deals can be had in the vicinity—including Fried Dumpling’s own sister establishment on Mosco Street. For another, we’ve become too attached to the distinctive appeal of Sorella to hold its conspicuous elegance and culinary refinement against it.
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