My father gave me that long overdue talk every dad gives his son at that certain age.
“It should caress and wrap, like a dress on a woman. Like petals of a flower. Like prongs on a diamond ring.”
My dad, Jeffrey, was teaching me the finer points of siu mai, the pork and shrimp dumpling served at every dim sum restaurant in the world.
He knows a thing or two about Chinese cuisine: My dad wholesales cookware and utensils to Asian restaurants in Seattle and has eaten thousands of dim sum meals in his lifetime. His restaurant background is why I put bread on my table by writing about breads on the table.
I’ve been to enough dim sum restaurants to differentiate delicious from not–but not enough to separate the good from the great. It was time I learned. While my family was in town recently, it was only natural to pick my dad’s brain over Sunday morning dim sum. We headed to Phoenix Restaurant, the largest and arguably most famous of the Chinatown joints serving dim sum.
With roots in the Guangdong province of southern China, dim sum is Chinese for “a little bit of everything.” It arrives on small plates and is served family style, akin to Spanish tapas. Most dim sum dishes are steamed or deep fried.
In Hong Kong, where my parents grew up, dim sum restaurants were–and remain–the place where families go to iron out differences, celebrate, eat and drink tea. Like attending mass, my parents rarely missed the Sunday morning tradition. They would wait an hour or more for a table with no complaints. Then they’d sit down and gossip into the early afternoon, while carts stacked with bamboo steamers, plates of fried squid and cauldrons of congee circled the dining area.
By the time my folks and I arrived at Phoenix on that Sunday morning a few weeks ago, the crowd already overflowed the lobby and stretched out onto Archer Avenue. Diners conversed in a lively chorus of Cantonese and English. We were seated 45 minutes after arriving, and an elderly lady pushing a cart loaded with plates of spring rolls (the proper Chinese term for an egg roll) quickly stopped by our table.
We were served three golden, light and crispy rolls filled with a pork-and-bean sprout filling and a small dish of fluorescent red sweet and sour sauce.
“It’s Americanized,” my dad said. “There’s no sweet and sour sauce in China.”
In Hong Kong, he explained, spring rolls would be accompanied by Worcestershire sauce, a condiment popularized in the 20th Century when Great Britain held colonial control of the territory.
He continued: Phoenix’s spring roll rendition was fine and fairly by-the-book, but it did not have that audible crispness that he likes when biting down. This, he suggested, may be because the frying oil wasn’t hot enough. Another theory? The wrapper may not have been rolled tightly enough and frying oil could have seeped in. Done right, the spring roll would fry up practically grease free. But this, my dad said, is a minor quibble.
A plate of chicken feet came next, a dish many Westerners avoid. Translated literally from Chinese, it means “phoenix talons,” a creature with heroic status in Chinese lore. Much of the country’s food is eaten because of its symbolism, or because the name of a dish is homonymous with an auspicious term. “Fat Choy,” for example, is a black, stringy algae eaten during the Chinese New Year. It also sounds like the word for good fortune.
My dad held up a chicken foot with chopsticks and examined it, like a jeweler inspecting a precious stone.
To me, it’s like eating chicken skin with a sliver of meat surrounding bones. For dad, he’s eaten enough chicken feet to tell this version was done well: he said it was boiled in water, deep fried to puff up the skin, then marinated with a black bean, garlic and chile sauce before re-steaming. The only quibble was that the feet were too small, unlike the enormous, meaty versions found in restaurants in Hong Kong as well as Vancouver, the Canadian city he believes has the best dim sum in North America.
And so he went on, first about the deep fried taro (overcooked, soggy on the bottom, breading should be delicate and perky) and the steamed BBQ pork bun (fantastic dough, but pork could have been juicier) and then the steamed Malay sponge cake (lightly sweet, fluffy as cumulus clouds and dead delicious).
Watching him speak, his dim sum philosophy became clear. My dad would always ask how recently the dishes were cooked. It’s got to be served freshly steamed or fried. He won’t accept cold food–the flavor changes, he said. He’d rather wait five more minutes for a fresh batch from the kitchen.
He explained that how a restaurant makes its shrimp dumplings (ha gow) speaks volumes about the establishment. On first look, the dumpling did not appear symmetrical–one corner was longer and higher. Was this wrapped by an apprentice? An expert chef can wrap a shrimp dumpling in his sleep, Dad said, making each slightly smaller than a golf ball with at least ten crimps in the dough wraps seal. The shrimp inside tasted quite fresh, but lacked an important textural element that Chinese diners covet.
It’s pronounced “waht” and means silky smooth slipperiness without oiliness. While the shrimp dumpling wasn’t “waht” to my father’s tastebuds, the beef crepe exemplified the term.
The nearly translucent rice flour crepe rolled up with a beef filling glimmered from its steam bath and was covered with sweet soy sauce.
“It’s not too thick,” he said of the crepe, “and thin enough. You don’t want to be biting into a cloth. And the sauce is very light. I like it.”
The crepe was hard to pick up with chopsticks, the dish’s first sign of “what.” The smooth crepe wrapper and beef glided inside the mouth, a light savoriness accented with sweet notes of soy. A feeling of etherealness washed over.
My dad explained another key textural element: the idea of “songh.” That means a freshness through mouthfeel, one that produces a nudge of resistance when biting in. This can be accomplished by roughly mincing meat with a cleaver–coarse, but not overworked like meat forced through a grinder.
The siu mai (pork and shrimp dumpling) was quite “songh,” thanks to the liberal use of fatty pork. For this dish, mushroom, along with the pork and shrimp, are formed into a meatball, then cupped in a wonton egg wrapper before steam cooking.
Phoenix did a dandy job keeping the dumpling moist, while the meatball retained a slight snap. The wrapper drooped, however, and my father brought up the dress analogy–how it should hug the meatball, like lovers in embrace.
Oblique analogy, perhaps, but the excitement in his voice was evident. The lessons he conveyed are the unspoken ones, the kind articulated with a chewing nod and a sideways glance. When I paused to appreciate the utter simplicity of the dishes, I began to see and enjoy dim sum through a whole new, sparkling lens.
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Importance of dim sum and why you should try ha gow
Phoenix Restaurant, a Chinatown institution for the last 11 years, serves 3,000 diners each week. Most dim sum servings at Phoenix cost $2.75 to $4.75; a family of four can eat for around $40. We spoke with the restaurant’s director of operations, Eddie Cheung.
Q. Why is dim sum important to the Chinese culture?
A. Everybody comes. During the weekday, the elder generation would come for a cup of tea and something to eat after they perform tai chi. Business people will come for lunch. And on weekends, it’s a family outing–grandparents, kids, everyone.
Q. How hard is it to become a dim sum chef?
A. It takes a lot of experience. Everything is made by hand. My head chef was trained in Hong Kong and has 30 years of experience. My second chef has about 15 years of experience.
Q. For first-time dim sum diners, any tips you’d like to share?
A. Tell the wait staff what you’re allergic to. We prepare our dim sum early in the morning, but we’d be happy to make dishes for people with food allergies on the spot.
Q. What are your can’t-miss dim sum dishes?
A. The shrimp dumpling (ha gow), pork and shrimp dumpling (siu mai), chicken sticky rice with lotus leaf (noh mai gai), BBQ pork steamed bun (cha siu bao), crepes (cheung fun). Maybe exotic dishes like chicken feet or beef tripe, if they can accept it.
— Kevin Pang
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A dim sum sampler
Whether dim sum is served from rolling carts or by diners selecting items from a menu, here are some places known for their authentic, Cantonese-style dim sum.
Phoenix Restaurant
2131 S. Archer Ave.
312-328-0848
9 a.m.-3 p.m. daily
Happy Chef
2164 S. Archer Ave.
312-808-3689
9 a.m.-4 p.m. daily
Shiu Wah
2162 S. Archer Ave.
312-225-8811
8 a.m.-3 p.m. daily
Furama
4936 N. Broadway
773-271-1161
9:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sun.-Thurs., 9:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri., Sat.
Jockey Restaurant
6104 Cass Ave., Westmont
630-969-8228
11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. weekends only
–Kevin Pang
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kpang@tribune.com
