So I went to a Chinese restaurant yesterday. They had ladies there pushing around the carts. I wound up ordering an entree off the menu. Mainly because the Dim Sum card they dropped on my table was all in Chinese, and offered no explanation of what was what. The only thing I was brave enough to try was the pork fried egg rolls and the pan fried dumplings.
It wasn’t until I got home later that day and did some research on Dim Sum, that I realized I had actually missed out on what looks like some tasty dishes. For instance BBQ pork inside a sweet sticky bun? That’s actually a thing? Wow! I want that!
So anyway, I’m half tempted to go back there today and give this place the proper justice it deserves.
So what say you fellow Dopers? What’s good? And what ain’t?
The cards are in Chinese but you don’t order from the card. When you see the cart come by, point at something that looks good and hopefully it will be delicious. If not, you’re out a few bucks and you’ve learned something about dim sum you don’t like.
The servers will mark the card with the item you ordered. If you have questions about what something is or what it costs, you can ask. The servers usually know the item’s name and price in English and the name will be descriptive enough to give you an idea.
I like a lot of dim sum, but I still don’t know all the names of the things I like.
That’s the way it works. I like the food but it’s mostly dough. It’s an inexpensive meal, good for a group of people, kind of fun to try the things out. Depending on the restaurant you may be able to order all the dishes off the menu if that’s the way you like to do things.
Sadly the dim sum place I got to stopped having the carts go around and now you get a menu and mark down what you want and they bring it to you. The food seems to be pretty much the same but a lot of the fun of going to dim sum is seeing all the different stuff in person.
I never could bring myself to try the chicken feet, though. But I tried nearly every other offering they had, over the course of 2 years, at our old local Dim Sum place. Such fun!
The first time I went to dim sum, it was in a work group, and two of the co-workers were Chinese-American, and could explain what everything was. So perhaps you might go with someone more experienced with this sort of food.
Too bad for you-- you’re missing out on a great meal.
Start with the familiar (pork buns or dumplings) and work your way to the not familiar and find out what works for you. If you’re lucky, the ladies pushing the cart will speak enough English to describe what’s on the cart.
Learned enough Chinese from my Chinese gf to order in Cantonese, and I hesitate to try and spell any of the dishes, but here goes for some of my favorites:
Try the really wide noodles (a type of fun)
Sui Mai (dumplings)
Char siu bao (steamed pork buns)
La bok go (turnip cakes-- they are delicious, trust me)
Juk (rice porridge)
If it’s an authentic Cantonese style place, order a serving of Hong Kong Style chow mien. It’s really delicious-- they fry it a bit at the end to make the bottom noodles really crispy. It makes a nice “main dish” if you think the others are too small. If it’s just your run-of-the-mill Chinese place, don’t bother. It’ll just be plain old chow mein.
Chicken feet look kinda gross, but you’re not missing much if you skip them. Hardly any skin on them bones!
You’re not missing anything. It’s mostly gristle and skin. Imagine gnawing on a chicken wingtip and you get the idea. The Chinese have an appreciation for some foods that’s all about texture, so there are several kinds of foods/ingredients that are pretty tasteless but have a particular texture that is prized. So things like cloud ears with their weird gelatinous crunchiness, or jellyfish, or cartilage.
Dim sum’s one of my favorites. I’ve tried nearly everything from all the carts, except for the above-mentioned chicken feet.
It’s not mostly dough; a lot of the dumplings are mostly meat, with a thin delicate skin encasing it.
I’ve taken a step up to the next level of dim sum. It’s Xiao Long Bao, or soup dumplings. They’re a Shanghai specialty. They’re not dumplings in soup, they’re soup inside of dumplings. In addition to the ball of pork and crab inside, there’s a generous gulp of piping hot soup! It’s an acquired skill to be able to eat them without giving yourself second degree burns. But it’s worth every scald.
Best time I’ve at at dim sum was when I went with someone that already new how to dim sum. Maybe I’m just not college material but the learning curve on getting what you want seems steeper than it should especially if you don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese.
If you go to a place with carts, then as each one stops by you can gesture and have them show you what they have. If you go to a place where you mark down on a menu, some places will have English equivalents, but if not, then that’s more difficult. you can look around the room and point to what other people have if no one speaks English there. Churn fun is pretty fucking good. It comes with different stuff inside so you can pick between shrimp, pork, beef, vegetarian. Wu Gok is one of my favorites. It doesn’t sound like all that, but man it’s good.
I don’t know the Chinese name ofTofu Skin Rolls, but they are fantastic. You can get them fried or not fried and I can’t tell which I like better.
What’s interesting to me is that in some parts of the U.S., dim sum is the default “Chinese food”. When someone from one of these areas says “You want to go out for Chinese?”, dim sum may be assumed. In other places, “Chinese food” may be popular, but dim sum is unknown.
In the New Orleans metro area, “Chinese food” is popular but dim sum is very difficult to find. Only two places that I know for sure offer it, and I think only on Sundays during the day.
I tried them. They didn’t taste bad; since they’re pretty much just chicken skin with a sweet-ish sauce on them. What they were, though, was a pain in the ass dealing with the tiny bones.
I found it rather easy, actually. I do typically go with someone who speaks Chinese but after one or two trips it’s easy to recognize the items on the carts. You sometimes have to hunt down the rarer dishes or go up to the special window but everything eventually comes by the table and pointing while holding up 1, 2, or 3 fingers seems to work. The waitstaff is used to dealing with people who don’t speak Chinese.
