Collectively, we have spent several decades in the grand Cantonese palaces of the San Gabriel Valley in search of the precision that nudges dumplings from fine to sublime and the attention to ingredients that ignite the senses like daybreak.
One gleaned the proper thickness for dumpling wrappers and bounce-back softness of a superior bao under the discerning eye of her grandmother, Tina Wong, who was raised in China’s southern Guangdong province, the capital of dim sum.
The other had his first great SGV dim sum more than 25 years ago, and never forgot the savory-sweet umami of taro cake flecked with dried scallop or the surprise pairing of shrimp and asparagus in the slip-slidey rice noodle rolls at now-closed Elite.
Where do we land these days? After a lot of research, a little disheartened. Consistent examples of excellence are harder, though not impossible, to find.
L.A. dim sum is in a slump.
What never falters is the euphoric chaos of the experience. The San Gabriel Valley has been the center of L.A.’s clamorous, communal style of dim sum dining since the area’s propulsive growth in the 1980s and ‘90s, tied to a surge in immigration from all over China. Servers tear through vast, thronged rooms, teetering stacked steamers made of bamboo or metal, pausing only to calmly place them in front of you and mark a piece of paper that keeps track of what’s been delivered. They’re already 10 paces away before you can yelp for ice water or chile oil, but they hear you and return wordlessly with the request moments later.
The community aspect of sharing dim sum keeps the stalwarts busy, and promising places can open suddenly and then close just as abruptly. Quality discernibly ebbs and flows. It’s hard to know why. Cantonese-speaking friends sometimes pass along whispers of secretive chef-poaching between kitchens, but when they outright ask managers about comings and goings (usually when we’re sitting there prodding them) they’re met with blank stares and hasty retreats.
Bite-sized foods like these are laborious, no question. But while rereading “Invitation to a Banquet,” Fuchsia Dunlop’s beautifully written opus on the cuisines of China, this passage resonated: “No Cantonese gourmet is satisfied with a steamed [har gau] dumpling if the prawns inside lack the requisite bouncy crispness, only achieved through lengthy preparations that include drumming under the cold tap, soaking in cold water, salting, starching and refrigerating; the dumpling skins must also be springy rather than soggy. Dim sum aimed at the western market is often lacking in pertness, as far from the Cantonese original as a couch potato is from an Olympic athlete.”
For every har gau we recently encountered, there were five with gummy wrappers sticking to the steamer liner that ripped to reveal lackluster seafood.
We narrowed down five dim sum destinations that we recommend for specific dishes. No place, we felt, delivered spectacularly across the board. We don’t rank this quintet, but if pushed to identify our favorite, we’d both name Sea Harbour.
Could the top players shift in the next six months? Sure. The fun is in the uncertainty, and making the rounds, and the unending debate.
Longo Seafood
When Longo Seafood opened in Rosemead near the end of 2017, it was arguably the swankiest dim sum palace in town, and the wait for a table was long. My grandmother’s mahjong group talked about the atmosphere and decor at length.
The dining room features a sprawling chandelier that snakes its way across the ceiling. And against the back wall, a gargantuan screen plays mukbang and travel videos. Flanking the screen are two LED panels that display colorful fish swimming along the bottom of a lush marine landscape.
The crowds have died down, especially on a weekday morning, but the dishes that helped the restaurant rise to mahjong group fame more than a decade ago are still dependable, and essential. If you’re into ham sui gok, the fried, miniature footballs are like a meat-filled doughnut and a glutinous rice dumplings in one. The crisp shell yields to a chewy, glutinous rice layer that surrounds the minced pork and vegetable filling.
The “salty meat sticky rice wrap” is a sizable mass of sticky rice studded with lap cheong and peanuts. A little drizzle of vinegar and some chile sauce should be required condiments.
And this is the only restaurant I know of that serves oatmeal snowcap buns, with pale, white tops coated in a substance that both tastes and crumbles like a sugar cookie. The baked bao is as soft, fluffy and mildly sweet as milk bread. Inside, the clump of oats is savory and almost meaty. It’s breakfast. It’s dessert. It’s whatever you want it to be. —JH 7540 Garvey Ave., Rosemead, (626) 280-8188, longo-seafood-restaurant.wherevi.com
Big Ma’s Kitchen
Who is Ma? Why do her plates and cups feature the letter “H” and appear to be dupes of Hermès dinnerware? What was the thinking behind having a small dining area with tables meant for two or four rather than larger groups like many of the other dim sum restaurants around town? There are many mysteries surrounding Big Ma’s Kitchen, which opened last spring in the former Jade BBQ and Seafood space on Garvey Avenue. And they’re all irrelevant. All you need to know is that there is a large, free parking lot; that dim sum is served daily between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.; and that the restaurant is home to the best black bean spare ribs I’ve found at a dim sum restaurant in all of the San Gabriel Valley.
The shumai might appear standard, but they’re plump with ginger-scented pork and shrimp, and an appropriately bouncy bite. Like shumai and har gau, steamed spare ribs are a dim sum staple. But though many restaurants serve them, they’re often tough and fatty, with little to no black bean flavor. At Big Ma’s, the ribs are cut into manageable pieces, with just enough fat to leave the meat unctuous but easy to eat. They’re coated in tiny bits of chopped garlic with plenty of fermented black beans strewn throughout. You may want to order a side of rice to eat with any leftover sauce in the steamer.
The restaurant also makes an exemplary version of hong mi chang, with sheets of red rice noodle rolled around youtiao that have been filled with shrimp paste. Your teeth sink into the chewy rice noodles, then shatter the crisp cruller beneath. The shrimp paste is only detectable as a faint, marine sweetness that hits your tongue as you reach the center of the roll.
And if you’re in the mood for barbecue, in the form of roasted pig’s knuckles, crispy-skinned pork belly or duck wings, there’s a compelling selection to round out the dim sum. —JH 7808 Garvey Ave., Rosemead, (626) 898-9189.
Sea Harbour
While the other restaurants mentioned above may excel at a handful of dishes, Sea Harbour has consistently covered all the dim sum basics for more than two decades. It’s one of the few remaining vestiges of what I like to refer to as the great Cantonese Golden Age of the San Gabriel Valley. It was a time when the area was replete with grand restaurants that specialized in both elaborate, banquet-style dishes and all things dim sum.
Its opening was preceded by the first Sea Harbour in Zhongshan, China, in 1992 and a second in Vancouver in the mid-1990s. Chef-owner Tony He went on to open multiple restaurants around Southern California and Las Vegas, but Sea Harbour is the one that beckons for dim sum. It was one of the first in the SGV to operate without push carts, with an emphasis on made-to-order delicacies.
Sea Harbour excels at slightly elevated versions of the classics. Jet black squid-ink-stained wrappers nestle a luscious scallop dumpling crowned with a funk-forward tittle of XO sauce. A cracked sugar topping mantles the French-style baked BBQ pork buns. They border on cloying, but the gloriously unctuous pork reels the bun into an acceptable level of sweetness.
But it’s the green-hued buns that seem to emerge the mutually agreed upon favorite. The buns get their faint green color and grassy, coconut-leaning aroma from the addition of pandan. At the heart of the soft, sweet, fragrant cocoon is a combination of both shrimp and pork. And for another layer of textural diversity, the tops of the buns are pan-fried. While this specific shade of green may hint at an otherworldly provenance, they’re a testament to the imagination and appetites that could help inspire the next Golden Age of dim sum in Los Angeles. —JH 3939 Rosemead Blvd., Rosemead, (626) 288-3939.
Lunasia
The har gau at Lunasia are the Ford F-650s of dumplings. No reasonable person wrangles them in one bite. Each packs several pieces of shrimp in a thick, chewy wheat-starch wrapper that glows almost silvery under the light. It’s the same with the restaurant’s shumai, dense wads of ground pork and shrimp so enormous that their thin egg-flour sheaths invariably slide halfway off during steaming. “It’s dim sum déshabillé,” a colleague quipped after I texted her a photo. I much more prize these yum cha cornerstones when they’re made small and delicate, but I may be in the minority. In the last 10 years, as Lunasia’s popularity and locations have expanded, I’ve noticed other L.A. dim sum restaurants also supersizing their dumplings.
Owner Shyi Kai Chang and his team operate outposts in Pasadena, Cerritos and Torrance — and Pasadena will also be the recipient of a forthcoming premium spin on the brand — but I agree with the collective wisdom of L.A. dim sum aficionados that the original flagship, opened in 2009 by founder Betty Lau, is the best among the current options. Expect hordes of people on weekends during prime daytime hours, and likely a short to moderate wait around noon even on weekdays. There is real joy here in watching families, convened at large tables covered in white linens, as they reach and pass and look up to eye the contents of every steamer basket that arrives.
Lunasia’s all-day menu, to continue its theme, is mammoth, and if you choose, a meal can veer into entrees of honey-walnut shrimp or filet mignon in black pepper sauce. I keep the focus on dim sum. However Frankensteinian the shumai, the seasoning of the filling is finely tuned, with a hit of dusky white pepper to nicely complicate the saltiness. The large-format approach to dumplings works best with a tapered variation in which a scallop fits into an open-faced wrapper dyed black with squid ink. The shredded pastry of the crispy shrimp roll has a satisfying, filigreed crunch. Lo mai gai, the sticky, meaty rice bundles wrapped in lotus leaves, are fragrant and balanced, particularly a version laced with abalone that brings some welcome marine funk to the mix. —BA
500 W. Main St., Alhambra, (626) 308-3222, and other locations, lunasiadimsum.com
Palette Dim Sum
If you’ve ever delved into the many dim sum possibilities of the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ve probably heard of the original Koi Palace in Daly City, a 450-seat institution that’s a 10-minute drive from SFO. Given its size, Koi Palace set an exacting standard of shocking consistency for many years. Under the leadership of Willy Ng, who founded the restaurant with his brother Ronny in 1996, the company has been in expansion mode, opening two more locations of Koi Palace; a second restaurant called Dragon Beaux in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond district (which I preferred to Koi Palace during a dining sprint across California last year); and a flashier concept called Palette, with two branches in the Bay Area and one in Las Vegas.
A fourth Palette arrived in Tustin in December. The restaurant is operating in “soft opening” mode, with a limited menu of a dozen dim sum standards. Palette’s approach blurs the line between innovation and gimmickry. A platter of multicolored har gau includes an eye-catcher dyed with beet juice and stuffed with a goji berry filling. Another luxury take on har gau involves lobster that comes with a dropper of warm lobster butter meant to be injected into each dumpling.
Cutesy dim sum is not my thing, and I was ready to outright reject the place until the order of traditional har gau appeared — and they were excellent, compact and sheer and popping with texture. Pork and shrimp shumai were similarly petite and balanced in textures. A plate of pea tendrils wafted garlic, the textures leafy and crisp. I loved the dan tat, the tart shells textbook flaky and hot and the custard not too eggy.
So Palette has possibility. If the eventually-expanded menu can lean enough into tradition, Orange County might have a new dim sum destination that gives the L.A. standard-bearers some competition. —BA
3015 El Camino Real, Tustin, (949) 288-8806, palettedimsum.com
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