royal seafood dim sum

Shrimp dumplings
(traditional chinese: 蝦餃, pinyin: xiā jiǎo, jyutping: haa1 gaau2)

I don't have dim sum nearly as much as I'd like to. Maybe it's something to do with feeling like a bit of a glutton every time I do. It's a vicious cycle actually. As I don't go that often, I would almost always order one too many dishes. Let’s have that extra dish of siumai and please let me have another dish of prawn dumplings. This would invariably lead to the gluttony in the first place. I'm convinced that having all the enticing dishes carted around in the restaurant doesn't help my cause either.

dragon palace dim sum

This restaurant was another suggestion of my epicurian cousin, so expectations were high. This restaurant was a newish restaurant, it was quite grand and huge. And like many dim sum places, we had to take a number when we arrived and waited until a table was available. On Saturday, at 11am, there were quite a few people wanting to eat there, we waited for about 20-30 minutes.

The restaurant was decorated quite tastefully, it was clean. The service was efficient and professional. The teapots were refilled constantly without us having to wait too long. When we wanted something that was not in the cart, straight away it will be separately ordered for us, rather than having to wait for the other carts to come around.

golden century salty egg bun

When I was in high school, my cousins and I collected our pocket money and decided to try out the fabled snow crab from a high class restaurant called Golden Century. This was such a luxury for five high school kids who, at that point, did not have enough money to buy one individually. We pooled our money and went to the restaurant the day before to pick our crab. If you can imagine, a 3kg snow crab can cost $200, depending on the season. So, we chose one not too big as we had to stay within our budget. I have to remind you again that we were a bunch of high school kids, $200 was a lot of money, especially during that time. Before the actual dinner, we constantly talked about the marvelousness of this crab, that when dinner came, I didn't think it lived up to any of our expectations. And because we didn't order anything else, I was still quite hungry after we finished.

I had never been back to this place, until recently when my sister took me for one of their dim sums. Every time I went past this place, it used to remind me of my foolishness, when I wasted so much money without getting any satisfaction in return. I was a bit apprehensive when my sister took me there, thinking the food was not going to be good. I was quite wrong.