As Momo Dumplings, the pair specializes in a style of dumplings popular across Southeast Asia, and especially in Kathmandu, the mountainous capital of Nepal, where Mahima was born. They wrap, steam and sauté their momo in Indian curries, the recipes for which the elder Shrestha picked up while working in restaurants in London.

Even though the momo are only available on delivery apps or for pickup, though, Denver Post readers deemed them, by popular vote, to be the best dumplings in metro Denver last month during our annual food bracket challenge.

It was a nice win, but Mahima’s real goal is to move from the commercial kitchen to a full-service restaurant next year, she said.

Mahima, 31, didn’t meet her father until she was 12 — Madhab worked in London to raise money for Mahima and her family in Kathmandu — but she credits him for drawing her toward the restaurant industry.

“He gave me an identity to sell food,” she said.

But it would take a while for that to happen. After reuniting in Nepal, her family moved to California in 2012. “But the mountains, they were teasing me,” she said about Colorado, which draws a lot of Nepalese residents because of its similar climate.

A cousin serving in the U.S. Army beckoned them to the state, where he was stationed. “He told me, ‘Come down here. It feels so much like Nepal, you won’t even miss it.'”

After finishing high school, Mahima studied business and was hired by a leasing company. Her father returned to the kitchen, first at Little India Restaurant and Bar in Lakewood and then at Mehak India’s Aroma in Cherry Creek. But after the COVID-19 pandemic made life hard for restaurant workers, Mahima suggested that the two strike out on their own.

They opened Momo Dumplings inside the Aurora ghost kitchen in 2021.

Momo are immensely popular in Nepal, where they can be found everywhere. There is nostalgia to the image of washing down momo with a can of Coca-Cola, Mahima said.

Surendra Pokharel, who runs Mantra Cafe, a Nepalese and Indian restaurant in Denver, agreed with that assessment. The momo is so dependable, “it’s like a burger here in the U.S.,” Pokharel said.

The development of this special kind of dumpling came about because of the multiple cultures that met in Kathmandu, Pokharel continued. “When there was very good trade in Tibet and Nepal, people exchanged their culture, exchanged their food and language and everything.”

The varieties at Momo Dumpling are made using pre-packaged dumpling wraps (the type found at Asian supermarkets like H-Mart) and chicken, lamb and vegetable fillings the Shresthas prepare in advance.

In the center of the incense-cleansed room, Mahima and Madhab, with the assist of Mahima’s husband, Samir Shrestha, stuff and fold hundreds of momo by hand, capping each one with a gentle pinch and twist of the finger. They arrange them in neat rows on metal trays and store them in a freezer, ready to steam for the next catering or takeout order.

Tubs of garam masala, turmeric, cumin, coriander and a special “momo masala” on a shelf are used for the Indian curries and sauces that Madhab mixes with the momo once steamed. His recipes include a tomato-based tikka masala, a creamy korma made with cashews and coconut powder and spicy vindaloo.

Their pace is quick, the atmosphere breezy. They’ll sit for hours and talk as they fold, Mahima said. They’ll cater orders together and set up their stand at the Southlands Farmers Market in Aurora and the Parker Farmers Market. (They also supply momo to three restaurants they refused to name out of confidentiality.)

Earlier this month, the 65-year-old Madhab, who spoke Nepalese as he worked, underwent a major surgery. He took about a week off but was back in the kitchen to prep for two catering orders, Mahima said.

“I would not do anything without him,” she said. “Not even a step in this kitchen. I would shut it down tomorrow.”

That’s because she doesn’t want to lose out on any more time with him — time they weren’t afforded back when she was a child growing up mostly under the care of her grandmother, while Madhab was in London and her mom was away working.

She was wary of the restaurant industry and its trappings at first. But when her son was born, the ghost kitchen gave her and Samir the flexibility to be with him at home.

“For me, that was important to give to a child, at least for the first three years of his life,” she said.

It also helped them save up for the next big thing, to a location with more — any — visibility. There’s one potential unit on Havana Street, Mahima said, and another on Tower Road.

“There’s one in RiNo that’s catching my eye,” she said. She’s sought the support of municipal small-business programs in Denver and Aurora and hopes to relocate Momo Dumplings by next year.

Momo Dumplings is open for takeout, catering and delivery at the Aurora Eatery, 14200 E. Alameda Ave. #1039B, Aurora. Orders are made online at

Now we do. Five weeks of (bot-free) reader voting knocked out 30 dumpling restaurants — from Michelin-recommended hot spots to old classics to more modern heavy hitters — leaving just two remaining.

We now have our champion.

, at 14200 E. Alameda Ave. in Aurora, stands at the top. The restaurant specializes in Nepalese-style dumplings, with flavors that include tomato-based, spice-infused tikka masala momos; creamy curry korma momos; and simple steamed momos, seasoned with fresh herbs and served with dipping sauce.

The business beat out its competitor, Rocky Mountain Momo in Englewood.

We’ll have more on Momo Dumplings in the next few weeks, but until then, thanks for voting.

So do the number of bots and questionable entries in the online polls we launch every week during the contest. Only a third of the 3,000 votes cast during our Final Four round submitted their names and emails and were deemed legitimate by our editors.

Disregarding the incomplete entries, two clear winners are advancing to our last head-to-head matchup to determine which restaurant makes the best dumplings in the Denver metro: Rocky Mountain Momo (9678 E. Arapahoe Rd., Englewood) and Momo Dumplings (14200 E. Alameda Ave. #1039B, Aurora).

Both specialize in a South Asian variation of dumplings known as momos, popular in India, Bhutan, Nepal and the Tibetan region. The tight crescent-shaped, curry-smothered snacks have a unique reputation in the Front Range, with restaurants and food trucks serving momos scattered across Denver, Boulder and smaller main streets.

Strong online fanbases (momoheads?) have represented the last two contenders throughout our food bracket challenge, which started late last month with 32 dumpling restaurants. Rocky Mountain Momo promotes itself as offering the “momo and Coke” experience, speaking to a popular pairing in Nepal. Momo Dumplings sells momos for pickup and delivery, special events and farmers markets.

Rocky Mountain Momo bested dim-sum restaurant Star Kitchen in the previous round with 446 votes over 137. Dumpling chain Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings earned 258 votes but not enough to beat out the 404 in favor of Momo Dumplings.

It’s not too late to visit each eatery before our bracket challenge concludes. Vote on which is making the best dumplings in the metro below — the online poll closes midnight Sunday, March 29. 

The contenders would ultimately represent two cuisines of the Mile High food scene: East Asian dumplings and, more specifically, momos, a Tibetan and Nepali variation also familiar in India and other countries in South Asia.

Despite the competition being lopsided in favor of the former, restaurants serving up both East Asian dumplings and momos are moving on to the final four.

The final matchups, as determined by our bracket and nearly 600 entries, are dim sum restaurant Star Kitchen (2917 W. Mississippi Ave., Denver) facing off against Rocky Mountain Momo (9678 E. Arapahoe Rd., Englewood) and expanding chain Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings (original location at 3316 Tejon St., Denver) taking on Momo Dumplings (momo-dumplings.com), an Aurora-based caterer and farmers market vendor offering carryout and delivery.

The fan bases for Rocky Mountain Momo and Momo Dumplings showed their support in droves and trounced their respective opponents in the last round, Hop Alley and ChoLon, both by almost 75% of the vote.

Star Kitchen and Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings advanced by smaller yet still impressive margins against Dillon’s Dumpling House in Aurora and LingLon Dumpling House in Denver, respectively. Both advanced with about 60% of the vote.

The online poll for our final four opens Wednesday, March 18 and closes at midnight Sunday, March 22. Cast your votes below:

Craving more dumplings? Read our recent features on Polish pierogis and Chinese dumplings.

Our competition started with 32 restaurants chosen by editors and readers specializing in dumplings and momos, a Tibetan and Nepali variation, in the Denver area. Two weeks later, only eight restaurants remain.

The next round of matchups in our Elite 8 competition to be decided by reader votes are:

Rocky Mountain Momo (9678 E. Arapahoe Road, Englewood) vs. ChoLon (multiple locations)

LingLon Dumpling House (2456 S. Colorado Blvd., Denver) vs. Star Kitchen (2917 W. Mississippi Ave., Denver)

Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings (multiple locations) vs. Dillon’s Dumpling House (3571 S. Tower Road, Unit G, Aurora)

Hop Alley (3500 Larimer St., Denver) vs. Momo Dumplings (; 14200 E. Alameda Ave. Entrance C, Aurora)

The most recent matchups recorded more than 460 entries. Our most popular head-to-head was Rocky Mountain Momo facing off against Yuan Wonton. Rocky Mountain Momo advances with 55% of 260 votes.

MAKfam, a Chinese restaurant with a Michelin nod for its value, faced a tough first-round opponent, The Empress Seafood, and scraped out a win. But this time, it wasn’t as lucky, losing to ChoLon, an upscale Asian fusion restaurant with multiple locations, by only five votes.

Make your picks below for who should advance to the next round. The online voting form will close at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, March 15.

It’s dumpling month at The Denver Post.

We are in the midst of determining who has the best dumplings in Denver in our food challenge bracket, and even visited a cafe to get a lesson in making them for the Lunar New Year in February.

But dumplings, of course, aren’t exclusive to Asia. Italy has its fair share, with tortellini, agnolotti, capunsei, gnocchi, canederli, turle, strangolapreti and ravioli. Greece has feta dumplings, Chile has chapalele, and Germany has dampfnudel. You will find kroppkaka in Sweden, kundiumi and pelmeni in Russia, papanasi in Romania and uszka in Ukraine.

And those aren’t even every variety of dumpling out there.

I’m Polish, and grew up eating (and then making) pierogi, mostly filled with potato and cheese (everyone’s favorite) or with cabbage and kraut. Over the years, we’ve gone a bit out of the box, making dumplings filled with pork and green chile, or blueberries, pizza fixin’s, pumpkin puree, cheeseburger and other crazy ingredients.

Then, in the fall, a trip to New England to leaf-peep and introduce a friend to my childhood home and East Coast family led me to a new adaptation.

We made stops in western Massachusetts, then headed east to Cape Cod and Provincetown, and up to New Hampshire and Maine, before swinging back down through Rhode Island and Connecticut. Along the way, we sampled regional delicacies, like New York-style pizza (the best kind), Maine lobster, fish and chips, fried clams and clam chowder — and discovered one amazing dumpling.

It was in Boston that we spotted a mushroom and onion pierogi over beet puree and topped with frizzled leeks on the brunch menu at restaurant. I’ve been making an adapted version of my grandmother’s Polish pierogi for most of my life, and the flavor combination and beauty of this little restaurant appetizer ($13 for three) truly blew me away.

So, at our annual pierogi-making party back in Denver in November — with the help of my traveling pal TJ and my nieces, who dined with us at Sloane’s that day — we recreated the dish, to rave reviews. The earthy subtlety of the beet puree complements the mushrooms, and the crunchy leeks add texture. Pyszne (delicious). And it’s so beautiful.

Mushroom and Onion Pierogi over Pureed Beets

Makes about 6 dozen, depending on size. Source: Original recipe from “Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans” (Allegro Editions), inspired by a dish at Sloane’s restaurant in Boston and adapted by Barbara Ellis.

Ingredients

For the filling:

• 2 16-ounce containers shiitake mushrooms, chopped small
• 2 sweet onions, diced fine
• 4 egg yolks
• Salted butter
• Garlic powder
• Salt
• Pepper
• Instant mashed potatoes or plain breadcrumbs (optional)
• Gravy Master or other browning liquid (optional)
• Pierogi dough (recipe below)

For serving:

• 1 pint beet and sour cream salad (available at European markets; see cook’s note below)
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 leek
• Neutral oil for frying

Directions

1. Saute onions in butter. Add mushrooms.
2. Season with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Cook until liquid evaporates. Add browning liquid if desired.
3. Remove from heat; add egg yolks. Toss in instant mashed potatoes or bread crumbs to firm up the filling if the mixture is very wet.
4. Cool before filling dough rounds.
5. Place a small amount in the center of the dough round and pinch to seal edges. (Use a small amount of water around the edge if needed to get a complete seal; otherwise they could burst when boiling.)
6. Gently boil the pierogi in salted water for 4-7 minutes, until dough whitens. Don’t overcrowd the pot, and stir gently to be sure they don’t stick to the bottom.
7. Remove the pierogi with slotted spoon, drain and then brush with melted butter.

To serve:

1. Slice a leek into thin strips and fry in hot oil until crispy. Remove with slotted spoon and drain on paper towel.
2. Puree the beet salad with the lemon juice in blender or food processor.
3. Fry the pierogi in a small pan until golden brown.
4.  Spread a heaping spoonful of puree on plate. Place a few pierogi in center and top with frizzled leeks.

Cook’s notes: If you can’t find shiitake mushrooms, white mushrooms will suffice. You could make your own beet puree from fresh beets and sour cream, but we found the ready-made beet salad from our local European Market, M&I on Leestdale Avenue in Denver, did the trick.

Pierogi Dough

From Jay Kruzel of Chicopee, Mass. Makes enough for about 8 dozen pierogi, depending on size and thickness of each dough round.

Ingredients

• 2 cups semolina flour
• 4 cups flour
• About 2 cups whole milk
• 1 egg
• 4-5 tablespoons sour cream

Directions

1. In a medium bowl, mix semolina and flour.
2. In a 2-cup glass measuring cup, mix 1 egg and 4-5 tablespoons sour cream (the amount depends on how dry it is the day you are making the dough). Beat well. Add milk up to the 2-cup line and mix. Heat in microwave, 30 seconds or so at a time, until lukewarm (not hot).
3. Pour the liquid into the flour mixture a little at a time, mixing as you go. Try to gather up as much of the flour as possible, but it’s not necessary to mix it all together. You’ll do that in the next step.
4. Turn out onto a floured board or countertop and knead. Dough should be slightly tacky.
5. Let rest at room temperature, covered by a clean, wet kitchen towel or cloth, at least 20 minutes.
6. Cut away a small amount at a time to make dough rounds, either with a pasta maker (we do thickness levels of 1, 3 and 4, but you may like the dough thinner) or a rolling pin.

Notes: If it’s a very dry day out, add more liquid (milk) to the dough. Leftover dough can be refrigerated overnight or wrapped in plastic wrap, placed in an airtight bag and frozen for up to three months. Do not use if it becomes discolored.

Nearly 500 readers voted in the first round of our annual, March Madness-adjacent food bracket. This year, our focus is on dumplings.

Easily securing a next-round spot were Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings, Hop Alley, Mason’s Dumpling, LingLong Dumpling House and Yuan Wonton.

The Empress Seafood, a dim sum restaurant (2825 W. Alameda Ave., Denver) featuring carts full of dumplings with other small plates, lost to MAKfam, a Chinese restaurant serving chicken and chive potstickers with soy sauce and plump chicken and shrimp dumplings in an emulsified chicken broth. MAKfam (39 W. First Ave.) received 56 percent of the vote in that matchup.

Also out in the first round is Bao Brewhouse, a dumpling restaurant with a prominent location on Larimer Square (1317 14th St.). ChoLon, which has a location nearby on 1555 Blake St., moves on with 53 percent of the vote to face MAKfam this week.

Joining these restaurants in the next round are Rocky Mountain Momo, Lan’s Noodles & Dumplings, Happy Dumpling, Star Kitchen, Fortune Wok to Table, Dillon’s Dumpling House, Yu’s Noodle Shop, Sherpa House and Momo Dumplings.

Our next round of matchups is live. Vote now on which of your favorite dumpling restaurants should move on. The online poll closes at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, March 8.

Based on the hundreds of responses resulting in several narrow matchups, it’s clear people have strongly held opinions over who makes the best dumplings in the Denver area.

These traditions followed Alexandria Holland from China, where she was born and then adopted, to different parts of Asia with her parents, and now to Denver, where she owns a tea shop, Kochi Cafe, at 4100 E. 8th Ave.. She learned to make dumplings as a girl and practiced with relatives while attending high school in Shanghai.

Related: The Denver Post is currently our annual food bracket, this year featuring dumplings. Vote now for your favorites.

“From my experience and my friends’ experience, it can be a really fun, lowkey way to meet people,” said Holland, 28. “It’s easy to spark up conversations when your hands are busy.”

Last Friday, about 20 customers showed up at Kochi to participate in Holland’s celebration, where they learned how to fill and wrap dumplings, boil them, and later — the best part — eat the miniature crescent-shaped pouches.

Holland had cooked the vegetarian and chicken fillings for the dumplings, minced almost to a paste, three nights earlier, and purchased enough dumpling wrapper packs from the grocery store to make 500 in total. She wrapped 200 of them herself, two nights before the event, freezing them and bringing them to the shop as reinforcements.

Most of the participants weren’t Asian. They were there to learn about Lunar New Year, and guests took great interest in scooping the dumpling filling from shared bowls into the wrappers, folding and pleating their edges into miniature crescent shapes.

As batches of dumplings were boiled in pots of water, her friend and co-organizer Xinyi Shen entertained with a presentation about the Lunar New Year in China. The holiday, which was Feb. 17 this year, is celebrated differently by the Han people, the ethnic majority, and the country’s more than 50 minority ethnic groups, she explained.

“Not all Chinese people eat dumplings during the Lunar New Year,” Shen said. They’re a traditional food mainly in the country’s northern provinces. On the last day of the Chinese New Year, known as the Lantern Festival, celebrants eat another type of dumpling, tangyuan, which are rice balls filled with a sweet filling, she added.

Dumplings come in all shapes and sizes, with the dough and fillings usually made fresh in large family gatherings at home.

For Kuanrong Zhu, 28, a friend of Shen’s who assisted during the event, filling and folding dumplings by hand with her relatives in Broomfield is an annual tradition. They made two different varieties earlier that week, she said: pork and shrimp with chives; and pork with napa cabbage.

How many dumplings can one make in a sitting? “Depends on how many people you can gather,” said Zhu.

The group at Kochi Cafe used all the packs of wrappers that Holland supplied. She, Shen and Zhu, who Shen said is the best dumpling folder she knows, demonstrated their techniques around the room. Zhu explained to one group how a wrap that’s thicker in the center and more flexible around the edges can hold more filling while retaining its shape.

Holland and her parents opened a previous version of Kochi Cafe in Thailand in 2012. But when she moved to Denver to attend college, a Kochi location followed. She took over the business in 2020.

Today, she sources teas domestically and from China, she said. Glass jars full of tea leaves are arranged around the Kochi Cafe room. Over the past year, she and Shen have hosted tea parties and other events inside the space.

Zhu and Steve Carman, who owns an aquarium maintenance company, helped Holland bring the trays of wrapped dumplings behind the counter. They dropped dumplings into boiling water in groups of fewer than ten at a time, stirring occasionally to separate them. Condensation built up on the shop’s windows, obscuring the view from outside.

“Typically for New Year, we do everything boiled, because you don’t want to burn away good fortune,” Holland said, one of the many superstitions associated with the Lunar New Year in China. (Others include not taking out the trash or doing any sort of housework during the holiday period, she said.)

Each boiled batch was ready in three to four minutes. Then they were scooped from the pot and set on a plate to rest, glistening and congealed, revealing the color of the filling within. Their texture was slippery and soft, even if the shapes weren’t consistent.

Dumpling restaurants have proliferated around Denver over the last few years. Employees at one of these newer concepts, Nana’s Dim Sum & Dumplings, fold untold dozens in front of customers. Other spots specialize in soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, like the sorely missed Lao Wang Noodle House, which cranked them out for 25 years from its quaint shop on Federal Boulevard.

At Kochi Cafe, the dumplings were accompanied by soy sauce and a pair of chopsticks. The participants who had wrapped them dug in as Shen performed a traditional Chinese dance on top of a red drum.

“Homemade ones are the tastiest to me,” Carman, 27, said. “You get to put whatever you want in them.”

Pierogies, tortellini and arepas could all be considered dumplings. So could frozen pizza rolls from Totinos. Dumplings are also used to describe fluffy matzoh balls or other European soup fillers, like kreplach.

For our purposes in this food bracket, however, we are focused on Asian dumplings — the kind you find in Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese and Nepalese — among others — restaurants in Colorado.

To do so, we polled our staff, and then we asked readers for their suggestions. The resulting list of 32, which you can see below, will now face off in The Denver Post’s annual March Madness-style food bracket, in which readers will vote for their favorites.

The contest kicks off today and runs for the next five weeks, through the Sweet 16, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, the championship match and, finally — a winner. Voting runs Wednesdays through Sundays each week. We hope you enjoy.

So, with the proliferation of dumpling restaurants and dumpling-centered restaurants in metro Denver over the past three years, we figured it was high time to see which dumpling destinations are making the most waves.

To do that, we have decided to make dumplings the focus of our annual food bracket. This March Madness-style bracket will include 32 different dumpling-focused eateries and allow readers to vote each week for their favorites in head-to-head matchups.

But first, we need your suggestions to narrow down the field. To help us fill out the 32 seeds, we’re asking readers to go to denverpost.com/theknow and use the form to make suggestions for us to consider. Then we’ll compile our bracket and roll it out for six weeks of voting starting on Wednesday, Feb. 25.

Get ready to eat, vote and battle, because the madness is just getting started.