Some time ago a friend on Hive had written about eating Dim Sum and upon viewing the post I immediately wanted to try it myself. My wife and I were able to find a restaurant in the adjacent city to where we live and we decided to give it a go just a few weeks later. One positive thing about Canada's culinary scene is its extensive multicultural variety. People from all over the globe live in the country and they bring their delicious food with them, so you can find just about every niche food you can think of (not that dim sum is all that niche anymore, its quite popular in Canada at this point). I'm sure that the flavors have been tweaked a little to fit the Canadian taste palat but for people like me who have no experience with every country's authentic cuisine, we probably can't really tell the difference. All that matters is that it tastes good.
The Restaurant
The restaurant was called Dim Sum House, which is a pretty straight forward name that lets everyone know exactly what its all about.
We went to the restaurant over the Christmas break and we went for a very early dinner around 3:00 or 4:00pm. There was literally no one else in the place and that suited me just fine.
The ambiance inside was modern with authentic exposed brick walls that are typical of our downtown area.
The Menu
The menu was on an Ipad linked to the restaurants app, so we made our selections and then submitted it directly to the kitchen. Let's take a look at what they had.
I had never had Dim Sum before so I didn't know what anything was, so naturally I wanted to try everything.
We didn't get dessert this time but I'll include what they had anyway.
They also had rice dishes and rice and noodle rolls and a few other things on the menu. I didn't take a photo of everything.
The Food
There was quite a bit of food on the table when everything came out but they didn't do the traditional thing that I've seen online where they stack the bamboo containers on top of each other. I was actually kind of looking forward to that. Oh well. Lets look a little closer at what we ordered.
We both had tea of course. I had jasmine and she had a black tea of some sort.
She really wanted wanton soup and I really wanted to try congee, so we ordered both thinking that they were individual servings.
The bowls ended up being huge, meant for multiple people for sure, so that was kind of a win in that we both got to have a bowl or two of each of them.
Actually we had a ton of the congee leftover so we took it home at the end of the meal. My wife wasn't really into it unfortunately.
We also got fried spring rolls and fried chicken strips that were really delicious.
For the actual Dim Sum we had the shui mai, pork and shrimp dumplings (above),
as well as the har gow, shrimp dumplings (above).
There was also the gyoza that we ordered. I think that was what it was. It looked like it anyway.
Everything that we got was quite delicious. We ate everything on our plates and left the restaurant feeling very full.
The Leftovers
There was actually too much food for us to eat entirely in that one sitting. We took a fair amount of the leftovers home with us.
I had congee, fried chicked and more Dim Sum dumplings the next day for lunch.
It was just as delicious on day two. There was still so much congee though that I couldn't finish it all and had it again a little while later. Next time I'll have to remember how big the servings are.
The Conclusion
All in all I thought that the meal was delicious and I would definitely go again to try the things that I missed this time around. I'd really like to try the steamed BBQ pork buns next time I go. Until then I'll just leave you with a few close up photos of the meal. Enjoy!
