/r/AskSF is wild sometimes with food recs.
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/r/AskSF is wild sometimes with food recs.
Someone wants a really high end dimsum spot
Someone recommends Good Luck dimsum (a dimsum takeout window)
This is like someone asking where to get ossobucco, and I tell them to get a bag of bones
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by [email protected]
Top tier: Yank Sing, Harborview, HK Lounge Bistro
Tier B (pretty good but not as fancy): Dragon Beaux, Palette Tea House, Osmanthus, Riverside
Or do what most bay area Chinese families do and go out to the Peninsula: Koi Palace, HL Peninsula
Cheap option in SF and Oakland that’s actually good: Dim Sum Bistro (takeout only), Ming’s Tasty (sit down restaurant)
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I feel like southern Chinese people are judging dimsum restaurants on different things. Let me see if I can explain.
- it’s not about the food items specifically; they’ll all have a set of similar classics (shrimp dumpling, turnip cake etc)
- there’s an inherent tiered system in the quality of the items: a very high end dimsum place will have less ‘doughy’ ‘skin’ on the dumpling; use not frozen / better ingredients -
A very nice dimsum place will also tend to have: a dedicated roast meats kitchen, a separate steaming team; AND a ‘cooked foods’ team (that does the noodles), maybe even a dedicated soup team
Usually with booze, very good quality Chinese teas. The kind of place you go to celebrate something special with your family.
An everyday dimsum place like say Koi Palace is a ‘let’s get the whole gang and then fight my brother to pay the bill’ kind of place. It has to be good, but not the best
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A takeout dimsum place is a ‘I’ll just grab a box of stuff to eat when I’m watching tv later’ kind of thing. It’s cheap and it does the job, but I’m not posting about it on Reddit as the best and nicest dimsum
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by [email protected]
My shorthand for ‘is this a really high end dimsum restaurant’: look at the menu. Every nice dimsum restaurant tends to be dimsum for lunch only, and they’ll have a separate full lunch / dinner menu with cooked or steamed foods.
If it has a large soup section, with most of them being ‘double boiled’ soups of some kind (soups that take more than 10h to make), it’s probably a serious dimsum restaurant as well. The kind you would take your parents to on their birthdays.
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@skinnylatte hey atleast they recommended a place actually serving dimsum instead of like, din tai fung
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@atsuzaki everything small and in a steamer basket is dimsum to sum!
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This only works if you live in a city with many Cantonese people.
If you don’t, you probably don’t have a very nice dimsum restaurant.
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@skinnylatte this kind of thing is fascinating to me. Like there are bet popular places in my area (Savannah, Georgia) that serve typical southern food. My dad, who grew up eating stuff like that, was rarely impressed.
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@Bfordham yeah i feel like there is a subtext for what people like or don't like about a thing, that's beyond just a 5-star or objective review about a thing. food is so deeply personal and political and based on experience and access, too
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@skinnylatte you are exactly right. I get unreasonably upset that I can’t grits in my local store that aren’t instant. I feel the ghosts of my grandmothers would haunt me
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Josh :everything_bagel:replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte Yank Sing seems to have lost a lot of popularity since I was a kid. I grew up going there for special occasions, so it’s kinda set the bar for dim sum for me, but the last couple times I’ve been back to California it seemed like it had fallen out of favor.
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ティージェーグレェreplied to Josh :everything_bagel: last edited by/me has flash backs to the first and last time he went to Yank Sing, with two friends.
/me is vegan, his two friends: were not.
/me's friends wanted to split the bill three ways.
/me paid an ASTRONOMICAL amount for an absolutely terrible meal with slim pickings.
