Dim Sum

This past weekend my dear friend, Lindsey, was in LA visiting Greg and I. I love having house guests, it is my favorite! That is a hint to all of you friends and family reading this, come visit us!! Anyway, having Lindsey here gave us a chance to step out of our routine and play tourists in LA, which we rarely do. I have been wanting to go and get Dim Sum in Chinatown for quite some time and, as Lindsey is one of my most adventurous friends, I figured what better time. I asked around and got a recommendation for a good place for us to try. I think you can get Dim Sum anytime, but I have heard that it's a great Sunday morning activity. (Yes, I know, don't look now...It's ANOTHER breakfast post!!! I swear I DO eat more than once a day, but somehow my posts just keep drifting back to breakfast!!) Rumor has it that you have to get to your Dim Sum location of choice early to avoid lines. I hate lines, especially when it comes to waiting for food--so we got there super early. Upon our 9:30AM arrival, there was no line at all and we walked right in and were seated without hesitation. It was literally as if they were waiting for us!

The best thing that I can say about Dim Sum is that we did it. In its defense, it was the most efficient distribution of the largest amount of widely-varied foods we've ever seen outside of a Vegas buffet. No sooner were we seated, giving a quick glance around the room to take in the ambience that is Sunday morning dim sum, before we were inundated by a barrage of carts loaded with foods, which required numerous repetition by the wait staff before we could decipher the actual name of the dish as "pork bun," or "shrimp and vegetable dumpling."



The BBQ pork dumplings (not sure if that's the actual name, though it should have been) were DELICIOUS! Getting back to the expeditious nature of the service, there is a clear method to it--hit you fast and hit you hard! In just under five minutes, our table was laden with dishes from one end to the other--none of which were duplicates! Somehow in the mix, my husband (fresh from the diversity course in his doctoral program) accepted a dish of chicken hearts! He took the first bite and after explaining the need to be open-minded and culturally sensitive, he then demonstrated the need to be open-mouthed, as he promptly ejected the bite onto the table as soon as he bit into it and it "resisted." Apparently, his American palate missed the diversity course. Fortunately for the rest of us, he decided to waive off the chicken feet...yes, feet.

Dim Sum turned out to be quite the educational experience, as we discovered a fact that has been carefully omitted from texts for far too long. Pork and shrimp have apparently been locked in an perennially losing battle with the Chinese. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of the dishes contained either pork or shrimp, or some marriage of the two in some type of rice-based textile.

Here is what our table looked like once we had all the food.



Basically, I am glad we went to get Dim Sum but I don' think I will be craving this anytime soon. Most of it was just weird, not the breakfast food that I would want.