Quest4Food: Dim Sum My Way Part 2

Now you are ready to eat.

Here's how we got to this point: Dim Sum My Way Part 1.

On my first visit to a dim sum place with my father and brother, we sat for about 20 minutes in a restaurant in Chinatown not knowing what to do. We had our tea and our water and sat staring at each other wondering, WTF. We did notice the old ladies pushing carts about and began to formulate a hypothesis when... A busy looking Chinese business man enters the restaurant, sit s down and starts yelling. The old ladies came a running and soon he had a bunch of food. He was soon a happy man, and we were happy that he was happy, and we were happy that we now knew what to do. The man soon buried himself in his newspaper and we soon began to eat.

There you have it, the secret to dim sum is to order food from the carts that go round and round. In some places the carts are supplemented or replaced by trays and in others there are no carts. In those places you order from a piece of paper. You just need to figure out what kind of a dim sum place you've stumbled into.

When ordering off of the carts the little old ladies will make a mark on your check which represents the item that you ordered. As you'd imagine some items are more expensive than others, just be sure you watch the little old ladies as they stamp your check, sometimes they will double stamp.

When eating some people will take the small saucer and fill it with hot chili paste and then add a little bit of soyu to the dish. Then they will mix it up and use it as a dip for some of the dishes, ususally dumplings. Dim sum is for the most part small bite sized portions and to a large extent a mixture of meat and vegetables wrapped in a flour pancake and formed into dumplings. But, dim sum can also be stuffed vegetables and chicken feet and sticky rice and just about anything small and tasty.

So, now you know what to do and how to do it, but what should you order?

Here's my list of dim sum staples that are always good.