Bay Area Dim Sum Crawl--What I Ate

As I have often stated, while the Los Angeles area has the best Chinese food in the United States, the one area of deficiency is dim sum, where the San Francisco Bay Area has multiple restaurants that are better than the best dim sum purveyor here down south, whatever restaurant that might be.  (In my mind there's no clear cut choice.)   I'd say there had been 10 or 12 Bay Area dim sum eateries I have eaten at which are clearly better than the best in Los Angeles.    But after my Bay Area visit in August which was not centered on dim sum, but where a couple of second tier places I visited were as good or better than the best in Los Angeles, I decided I needed to determine if there were additional dim sum restaurants beyond those I had already found.

 

First stop was Redwood City and Bao, located on historic Broadway St., best described as a modern dim sum restaurant.  Nice of them to make it so I can order one of everything! Included here are bbq pork, lava, chicken, taro, Sichuan pork, purple bean paste, mushroom and custard buns.

 

  

Next stop was Cheung Hing in Belmont, for this seldom seen scallop cheung fun.  So fresh and as delicious of a rice noodle as you can find.

 

 

For a fairly large restaurant, the dim sum menu at Superstar Dim Sum in San Mateo is rather limited.  These larger than normal steamed BBQ pork buns were excellent. 

 

Of course this called for a strawberry milk drink from TP Tea, right across the street.

 

Three dim sum stops were enough for the first day, so it was on to Pearl Bay Seafood in Fremont for dinner.  Their special char siu wasn't particularly special, though it was quite good.

 

Egg tofu with string beans and mushrooms made for a nice vegetarian dish

 

Absolutely fabulous sea bass with eggplant.

 

And the highlight of the evening at Pearl Bay, fish fillet with egg whites.

 

And topping off the first day's activities, a blue coconut mango drink from HeyTea in Milpitas.

 

Day 2 started out at Chef's Wok in Alameda.  For a little island community, it was a fairly nice and sizable facility.

 

Something I had never seen in a dim sum restaurant before were these ox tail pastries, which like pineapple buns are named because of their appearance, not their content.  I had only seen these as cookies in the Chinese markets.

 

 And the eggplant stuffed with shrimp paste.

 

From there a short drive to Emeryville and Hong Kong East Ocean, where I last ate thirty years ago when it was merely called East Ocean.  For some reason, I thought the restaurant was in downtown Emeryville, but it was actually on a bluff overlooking San Francisco Bay.  I'm not a big abalone fan, but I couldn't pass up these abalone tarts which were excellent despite the canned abalone.

 

Been quite a while since I had seen salt and pepper egg tofu at dim sum.

 

I was fooled by the osmanthus tea jello.  The menu showed it as being pink in color, but it turned out to be the regular dark version.

 

I was so fortunate that I planned to be in the East Bay on the day that the new branch of HL Peninsula restaurant opened in Castro Valley, with the largest Cantonese restaurant in the United States.  It was really a mob scene there as I rolled up around 1pm.  The parking lot was full so I had to park a couple of blocks away.  I actually thought that I might not be able to get in, but the crowd waiting to be seated wasn't overwhelming.  Indeed the issue turned out to be  that the dining room had mostly large tables, and by the time I arrived, only small parties of under 4 persons had to wait for any length of time.  I probably ended up waiting about 45 minutes.

 

The large dining room had six giant video screens, three in front and three in back, presumably suitable for partitioning the room into two.

 

Such an interesting menu--but it turned out eventually that everything I wanted was sold out, except for one item, the red cherry mountain yam.  It would have been nice to sample the Tianjin twisted sweet buns, mango pork cheung fun, strawberry duck and green tea and mango crepe roll, but I was thrilled just to be there and get this one dish.  And with my prior positive experience at the other HL Peninsula locations in the Bay Area, clearly another dim sum restaurant better than anything in Southern California.

 

Since this was the third dim sum stop of the day, having only one item at HL Peninsula wasn't a big deal, but it did leave room to make another Castro Valley restaurant stop at 88 Bao Bao.  

 

Since 88 Bao Bao had a short list of dim sum items, I decided to order the beef roll instead.  Good choice as it had an interesting sweetness without using hoisin sauce.

 

Day 3 was the highlight of the trip with dim sum at the newly opened Treasure in Belmont.  What an impressive looking restaurant from the moment you walk in.  (Actually the exterior hanging lights would have been more impressive if it were night time)

 

An interesting concept was dim sum combos where you could get small portions of three items served together, like chicken feet-spare ribs-tripe

Or taro, turnip and sweet mochi.

 

Never seen steamed chicken bao like this!

 

 

As you can see, the visual presentations were sensational.  Who would think that vegetable egg rolls could look so good, with gold foil decorating the bottom.

 

 

Perhaps the best all time dim sum item, the lychee textured shrimp balls.

The har gow was not dressed up.  But it may have been the best ever!

 

The desserts were equally fabulous.  This may not look like dessert, but it's mango pudding, or as they call it mango corn custard.  So realistic looking corn!

 

Japanese cheese tarts.

 

And finally, snow mountain mochi purple yam.  What a meal!  My new favorite restaurant and clearly than anything back in Los Angeles!

 

Next stop was Ming Yuan in Daly City.

 

My one and only order of my beloved crispy baked BBQ pork buns.

 

 But the star attraction on the menu was the hometown fried fruit.  I couldn't wait to see what was inside this bun, as it came out pretty much looking like the picture in the menu.

 Opening it up, what do I see?  This.

Hey!  There's nothing fruity in this dish.  The savory filling quite resembled hom sui gok, with the glutinous rice exterior, though looking like a hom sui gok.  As was explained by one of my Instagram followers, there was a double translation error between Chinese dialects and into English, with the word for fruit also being for a fruit shaped item, which I believe was hom sui gok since it is pear shaped.  Oh well.

 

 

Another reason for me to go to Daly City was its proximity to the southern city limits of San Francisco.  While I had been determined not to go to San Francisco this trip, it was actually downtown San Francisco, and the trip there, that I wanted to avoid.   And I certainly had been fascinated by tales of Stonestown Galleria adjacent to the San Diego State campus, which has been famously touted for thriving in today's regional shopping mall environment, while San Francisco Center on Market Street in downtown San Francisco had lost almost every single one of its tenants.  So seeing Stonestown was just two miles away from Daly City.   As soon as I walked in I decided to take a self portrait.

 

  

But alas, anticipation exceeded realization.  Heading quickly over to the food court, it was disappointingly small, with only two Chinese eateries, Panda Express and Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks, neither of which was doing business at this mid-afternoon hour.  (I did see two other Chinese restaurants outside the food court, a hotpot, and Superior Dumpling, a Din Tai Fung wannabee.  

Oh well.  My red guava aiyu jelly drink was fine.

 

Getaway day was unscripted aside from 10 am dim sum at Golden Bay Seafood Dim Sum in Union City.  I had never heard of this restaurant, but it was very nicely appointed.

 

 

This glutinous ginger cake was exactly what I was looking for, though it was badly misnamed.  But I wasn't aware how bad the naming was, since they used a French word.  Later I found it that it translated to puff pastry.

 

And the seaweed wrapped crab was also another interesting item.

 

Right next door to Golden Bay Seafood Harbour was a branch of Sheng Kee.  Nice to see this chain still in business.  This is their oddly named summer romance blueberry bun.

 

 The rest of the day was spent at Milpitas Square.  A big shock was at Ocean Pearl, sister restaurant to Pearl Bay and Chef's Wok.  This fish cheung fun was unlike any I ever saw before.  Seems like it was made with grass carp, actually most identified with Taishanese cuisine.

 

A couple of doors down the theme was pink at Ume Tea.

 

And their mango watermelon breeze certainly hit the spot.

 

Can't pass up a Uyghur restaurant.  Here's the pepper lamb samsa at Kusan Bazaar.

 

The final stop of the trip was the Milpitas branch of Koi Palace.  I had not been to any branch of Koi Palace in many years, since the group set up Dragon Beaux and Palette to advance the charge of modern dim sum and left Koi Palace to their customers who preferred traditional cart dim sum.  But I decided to take a peek inside the Koi Palace in dim sum, to find that the restaurant had been remodeled and the menu had been updated.   

 

What a fantastic new menu item--natural bloom har gow, multicolored and multiflavored.  I believe orange is mala, red is tomato, and green is tea.  I'm guessing white is regular and black might be truffle.  Wow!

 

And duck burritos too!

 

Koi Palace Milpitas is certainly back in the top tier again.  I suspect the flagship Daly City location is not, since they will being moving into a giant new shopping mall location shortly, at which time they surely will be among the best again.