Neighbourhood Dim Sum
The small, delicate dishes of dim sum have spread around the world, following Cantonese people wherever they went, but one of the best places to get them is still Hong Kong. There are plenty of places here to go for yum cha (literally “drink tea,” used to describe the experience of eating dim sum in a restaurant) and just as many where you can buy dim sum piecemeal on the street.
While Sunday mornings usually involve a trip to some giant restaurant with hundreds of seats and harried waiters, my favourite dim sum experiences have been had in small, neighbourhood restaurants, where people wander in with a couple of friends for a laid-back dim sum lunch or dinner. These are, along with cha chaan teng, Hong Kong’s traditional neighbourhood cafés.
I recently visited three hole-in-the-wall places around the city. Here’s what I found.
Tim Ho Wan
Tim Ho Wan is clearly a labour of love: owner Pui Gor, a chef at the Four Seasons Hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant Lung King Heen, went across the harbour to Mongkok to open this hole-in-the-wall eatery to serve five star dim sum to the masses.
After suffering through endless baskets of mediocre dim sum at a multitude of other establishments, eating at Tim Ho Wan reminded me a bit of when I got my first pair of glasses: everything that was blurry suddenly became sharp.
The atmosphere here is more brasserie than banquet hall, with dark wood-panelled walls and a very tightly-packed convivial dining area. Servers walk around with coffee pots full of tea, like in an American diner.
We started with two of the most popular dishes: pig liver cheung fun and char siu bau. The cheung fun noodle was thin and wrapped around a firm strip of liver which was on the good side of gamey. The char siu bau was small, crispy and sweet, like a miniature bolo bau, and its filling was a bit more savoury than usual, which counteracted the sweetness of the bun. It’s one of the best char siu bau I’ve had, but then again, I’m a dessert fiend — some of my dining companions thought it was too sweet.
Every dish at Tim Ho Wan is made to order. The classics, so commonly screwed up at other restaurants, are outstanding here. The beef meatballs were tender, meaty and resplendent with the aroma of dried mandarin peel and cilantro. The radish cake, which so often takes the form of a spongy, tasteless brick, was actually filled with slices of real radish here — the way it should be.
Lam Kee
Forget Sunday dim sum in a giant banquet hall where aunties gather to out-brag one another about their childrens’ grades and uncles fight for the bill to save face. Lam Kee is for serious eating.
After operating for three decades as a dai pai dong, Lam Kee moved indoors to the Tai Po public market a few years ago, but it hasn’t sacrificed any of its street cred. The last time we visited, it was a Monday morning just before noon, and the air was filled with steam and the boisterous chatter of old folks from around the neighbourhood. Regulars wander in wearing “gaai fong chong” — “neighbourhood clothes” such as flip flops and a grubby t-shirt shirt, or whatever it is you were lounging in at home.
We sat down at a table with two poh-poh (old ladies) who were a bit surprised to see a couple of gweilos in their midst. One of the old women leaned over and told us, “This place is just as good as the big dim sum places, except it’s cheap, and they don’t even charge you for tea.”
We were next to the restaurant’s semi-open kitchen, where clouds of steam billowed up from big piles of bamboo baskets. Our siu mai arrived first and it straddled the line between firm and tender, with a balance of flavours between pork and shrimp. The har gau, shrimp dumplings, were tiny with just a small piece of shrimp in each, but they tasted fresh and the wrapper was perfectly chewy. The meal’s major disappointment was the cheung fun, which was overcooked and understuffed, with a rice noodle that was far too thick.
But the dish that truly summed up Lam Kee for me was the “chicken with random stuff,” baby corn, taro, chicken and luncheon meat wrapped in tofu sheets — an unlikely and unexpected mix of ingredients that somehow worked perfectly together.
Saam Hui Yaat
This isn’t your grandmother’s kind of dim sum, but only because this tiny dive on a grubby stretch of Pok Fu Lam Road is frequented almost entirely by men: construction workers, schoolboys, and retirees who spend their days at the restaurant munching on dim sum, listening to the horseraces on portable radios.
The interior decor hasn’t been touched since the 1960s — parts of the green tile floor, metal fans, mismatched furniture, and altar is covered in permanent grease. When the waiter arrives with a bowl and hot water for us to rinse our dishes, teacup and chopsticks, it seems like less of a convention and more an actual necessity.
Decreptitude might be one byproduct of age, but experience is another, and Saam Hui Yaat’s decades of operation have given it serious know-how in the steaming kitchen, where dim sum baskets are piled up in different sizes. The Chiu Chow dumplings here are particularly good and I loved the oyster sauce pork, fresh bamboo and carrot wrapped in a thin tofu sheet. There are some other non-dim sum dishes here too, which are more substantial, such as the shrimp omelette with rice.
Another version of this post was originally published on CNNGo. You can find the original version, along with addresses and contact information for the restaurants above, here.
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Tags: Cafés, Dim Sum, Hong Kong
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