Chef Pui Gor of Tim Ho Wan, a cheap, hole-in-the-wall, dim-sum-only restaurant with a cult following, makes a contemporary version of a bean curd skin roll, filling it with light shrimp rather than the traditional fatty minced pork. Some chefs have begun reviving old techniques, creating updated versions of the kinds of dishes offered by Lin Heung and its peers. “A handful of high-end restaurants have been incorporating top-shelf ingredients, including foie gras and morel mushrooms. Dishes like pork and shrimp dumplings topped with a hard-boiled quail egg are so popular that diners will crowd around as soon as carts enter the dining room.
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"Dim sums used to be bigger, heartier dishes that people ate to keep them full for a hard day of work," explained Amy Ma, a local food writer and former Wall Street Journal staffer, when she introduced me to the restaurant. The restaurant is packed every day with locals reading the newspaper, drinking astonishingly strong pu'er tea and eating dishes heavy with roasted, fatty meats. The oldest and best of these is Lin Heung Tea House, which opened in 1923. Though dishes like shrimp dumplings and egg tarts are what most Westerners think of as dim sum, many locals still enjoy the old Guangzhou style, which is served at a number of restaurants.
Anderson, author of "The Food of China." Along the way, dim sum evolved into a family affair, becoming popular for breakfast and brunch. (Shanghainese soup dumplings, for instance, were popular with émigrés who had fled the communist revolution.) They added foods associated with holidays and festivals, like rice and meat wrapped in lotus leaves, part of the early summer dragon boat festival, said E.N. Over time, chefs began to include dishes from other parts of the country.
They also incorporated Western techniques such as baking, developing now-classic dishes like baked pork buns and sweet egg tarts. They emphasized smaller portions, lighter ingredients and more elegant presentations. In the 1940s, when mainland China closed itself off from the rest of the world, chefs in British-controlled Hong Kong began developing their own dim sum styles. The practice also became popular in Hong Kong, where chefs followed Guangzhou's culinary lead. The restaurants originally served up simple snacks, but as the city grew, they began competing for customers by improving the variety and quality of their dishes. Back then, businessmen would meet in teahouses in the late morning to yum cha (drink tea). I grabbed a helping of everything that looked good, savoring a meal that seemed to capture the very essence of the city.ĭim sum as we know it developed in Guangzhou, the cultural and commercial center of southern China, in the 18th and 19th centuries, said Maria Tam, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. More servers came, pushing steaming carts piled with baskets of plump har gow, shrimp dumplings in delicate wrappers cheong fun-tender rice-noodle sheets-tucked around minced beef flavored with scallion and preserved orange peel and fatty, sweet spare ribs. As I gazed out at the boats crossing Victoria Harbour, a waiter appeared with a silver pot of jasmine tea. As I waited (and waited) for a table, I could hear though the open doors the clinking of china and the chatter of families enjoying brunch.įinally, I was seated at a linen-draped table. I was, after all, in Hong Kong, a city where eating ruffled siu mai dumplings, pork buns and meatballs early in the day is as much of a way of life as having an afternoon cup of tea is in Britain.
Sara Clemence on Lunch Break shows us some of the best pork dumplings, steamed buns and shrimp balls in dim sum-obsessed Hong Kong.
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