I first encountered dim sum in San Francisco’s Chinatown about a dozen years ago with Jeff, a colleague then, and still a great friend now. Cantonese dim sum is a style of meal roughly equivalent to eating a selection of appetizers, or to the Spanish tapas, the Brazilian churrascaria, or the Dutch reistafel. It’s a simultaneous offering of small tidbits of varying flavors, textures and levels of spiciness. It’s not expected to make a meal out of one or even two dishes, but to take a taste of many choices, each served on a small plate.
In a casual Chinese storefront shop, usually run by a husband and wife team, you walk up and point to four or five items that look enticing, and the choices will be placed on a plastic tray, which you’ll take to a small table on the sidewalk to enjoy. This is as close to “fast food” as you’ll see in Asia, though they still shun the “drive-thru” option. In finer dim sum restaurants, you are seated inside, girls push trays of dim sum around the dining room, and you stop them and choose items as they pass by.
A typical dim sum meal would consist of dumplings with spicy pork filling, beef ribs chopped into bite size pieces, cabbage and carrots sauteed in peanut oil, chicken wings in brown sauce, bits of calamari with chili pepper, steamed baby corn with ginger, and white or fried rice. Traditional beverages would include hot green tea and cold beer. I particularly like the Dutch variation, whereby all the dim sum choices are eaten out of the same bowl, and at the end of the meal a dollop of white rice is mixed in with all remaining sauces from the dim sum for a final blast of flavor.
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