In a city of great Chinese food, Mayflower Restaurantand ABC Seafood Restaurant are two of Milpitas' dim sum standouts. Doused with a little soy sauce, it was great. Better was the barbecue pork noodle, fat loglike rice noodles that concealed sweet, slow roasted pork. Hargaw, a crescent-shaped dumpling filled with shrimp, is spring-loaded with shrimpy juices, but the wrapper itself was a bit gummy, as if the dish had made several laps around the dining room before it made it to my table. Bite down and the little package squirts with savory juice and big shrimp flavor. The chives are visible through the translucent pan-fried wrapper. I also liked the chive and shrimp dumplings. That's especially true for dim sum where a world of flavors and tactile sensations are packed into little dumplings like these. Part of what makes Chinese cuisine so enjoyable is the variety of textures, often within the same bite. The steamed shrimp and pork dumplings are cylindrical, open at the top and packed tightly into a wheat flour wrapper. Siu mai is a dim sum classic, and it's good here. The servers stamp your bill with each dish you select and add it up at the end. Like most places, dim sum goes for between $2.50 and $6 a plate. You can go for the See's Candy approach and hope what's inside the boiled, steamed or fried little snack is to your liking, or you can grab a menu like I did and ask for the items that strike your fancy as the servers come by. As the carts wheel by, the servers hawk their wares, calling out the dishes in Mandarin and hard to understand English. Like all the restaurants I visited, the dim sum menu is quite long, with 100 or so items. It seems chaotic, but the lady at the front with the microphone calls out numbers for waiting diners like a bingo game and keeps the traffic moving. Fish tanks holding live rockfish, lobster, crab, shrimp and geoduck clams bubble at the rear of the restaurant. Servers wheeling carts of dim sum dart and weave through the seething masses like Manhattan taxis at rush hour. Come for lunch and you'll find a roaring crowd of several hundred eating and drinking tea. For first-time visitors, there's no preparation for the dizzying scene that awaits. Of all the places I visited, Saigon Harbor Seafood Restaurantwas the most compelling. I spent the past week yum-cha-ing my way through nearly a half-dozen Silicon Valley dim sum houses. Hearty pu-erh tea is an especially good match for dim sum. Yum cha ("tea drinking") is the term used to describe the dining session itself, as in "let's yum cha!" Instead of drinking tea after eating as is traditional in Chinese cuisine, with yum cha you drink tea with your meal because it's believed unsweetened tea helps digest the oily foods. It's served as breakfast, brunch or lunch. Other notable dim sum districts include San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver.ĭim sum is a subset of Chinese cuisine that refers to the array of intricate little dishes served with Chinese tea. Silicon Valley is one of a handful of dim sum–rich zones outside China and Hong Kong. While the Chinese diaspora has spread Chinese restaurants to every state in the union, dim sum, as yum cha is also known, is far less common. Instead of sweetened black tea, earthy pu-erh or floral jasmine tea are the caffeinated beverages of choice for teatime, or yum cha. The Chinese, by contrast, take tea with juicy pork and shrimp dumplings, steamed chicken feet and fat, wok-tossed noodles laced with garlic, chile peppers and green onions. AT TEATIME, the English have their crustless cucumber sandwiches, jelly-smeared scones, sugary tea and lots and lots of doilies.
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