Dim Sum Lunch

My cousin and I have an every- few- months ritual of a weekend dim sum lunch in  Chinatown, convenient both to her coming from Brooklyn and me from uptown.   The literal translation of dim sum is something close to  “touch your heart” and eating in a dim sum restaurant is called yum cha, ” to drink tea.”  Dim sum restaurants may be tiny holes in the wall or gigantic food palaces with noise to match but the first thing that invariably happens is that a teapot and cups are plunked on the table.

These are shu mai filled with vegetables:

And duck, not a super-typical dim sum offering but good although hard to handle with chopsticks:

And potstickers:

My cousin loves tripe and beef curd skin and I’ve been known to polish off chicken feet (a lot of work for a small amount of meat).  Dim sum do not  a glamorous meal make but are delicious and inexpensive.

After lunch, I dragged her  to a Chinatown bakery selling both Western and Chinese sweets and some East-Meets-West curiosities like a tuna salad Chinese bun.  I bought something called a chocolate nut roll that had a dash of powdered chocolate, a tiny sprinkle of nuts and dry pastry–it sounds odd but was just the taste I craved!

In Hong Kong, try dim sum at the Luck Yu Teahouse in Stanley, a  haven that opened in 1933. Luck Yu is a bastion of  Art Deco atmosphere  and brass spittoons and serves a tremendous variety of dim sum including many that don’t show up in US Chinatowns. The restaurant–a true teahouse–offers a huge number of different types of tea which I don’t have the palate to appreciate. What I did appreciate is the following recipe, given to me in Hong Kong by a long-time resident.

Lettuce in Oyster Sauce

Start with a head of  ordinary iceberg lettuce . Core it leaving the head whole.

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil.  Put the lettuce in the water and keep it in for two seconds only. Take it out, put it into a serving bowl and pour a full bottle of Oyster Sauce, preferably bought in a Chinese market, over it. Serve immediately.  It’s odd, delicious and unlike any other vegetable I serve.