Have no fear. Royal Star's supremely talented dim-sum chef, Lau Ka Hong, has moved over to Ping Pang Pong in the Gold Coast and imported a second dim-sum chef from Hong Kong—now the restaurant serves dim sum seven days a week. The menu has over 60 choices, elevating it to the status of top dim-sum restaurants in Asia.
The Gold Coast at first seems an unlikely setting for such a restaurant, but crowds are coming, and the place is full every day. You can order from a printed menu, but the normal way to do it is to wait until one of the rolling carts passes by your table, pointing to what you want. You could try English, but good luck: The carts are pushed by Cantonese-speaking women who shout out the names of their wares like hot dog vendors in Yankee Stadium—ha gow, siu mai, pai gwat. That's shrimp dumpling, pork dumpling topped with crab roe and black-bean pork spare ribs, by the way.
I recommend you just go with the flow, and when you've had enough, let them know. The Cantonese say "tai so," or "count 'em," when they've had enough. You'll be amazed at how much of this stuff you can eat, though, as it's light food, for the most part.
Check, Please |
The food world is clothed in black today, like the chicken in half-mourning a great chef creates by sewing truffle shavings under its skin. One of our true giants, literally and figuratively, R. W. Apple Jr., known to everyone as "Johnny," succumbed to cancer last week. Apple wrote seminal food pieces for The New York Times, the paper that employed him as a correspondent for nearly four decades. For me, he was a friend, and when he last came to Vegas, to eat in five steak houses in two days, he wore me out, despite being 15 years my senior. Apple was a great man, a great teacher and above all, a great eater. He will be sorely missed.
Max Jacobson |
Start by ordering tea. The default is jasmine, which I personally dislike for its slightly bitter aftertaste, so I always ask for bo lei, but if you tell them red tea, they'll get the idea.
Then note at the bottom of the menu the four letter categories, escalating in price from A to D. All this stuff, it happens, is laughably cheap. A is $2.18, and D is $5.88, so you won't go broke in here.
Many of the dim sum, further, come three or four to an order. The one choice for $5.88 happens to be my favorite one. That would be tong dumpling in shark's fin consommé, or if you translate literally from Chinese, "half-soup dumpling." Picture a bowl of chicken or pork broth with a huge, thin-skinned dumpling stuffed with shrimp, pork and mushrooms. Cut the dumpling open, and the contents spill out into the soup. It's an amazing dish.
Then there's lotus-leaf sticky rice, two giant bundles of rice in moss-green leaves that you must unwrap to eat. The rice is filled with chicken, Chinese sausage, mushrooms and other goodies, and two's company, a real meal for only $2.88.
Some of the dishes are, well, more for the Chinese palate. I've always been wild about spicy black-bean chicken feet, but I admit, it may be an acquired taste. Mixed fruit-fish roll can be filed under extreme eating, and no, we won't even go there. Chiu chow fun gor, diaphanous rice-flour dumplings with 10 or so different minced ingredients inside, is fabulous by me but definitely outside most people's eating horizons.
For $3.88, the letter grade C gets you delicacies like sesame rice-paper-wrapped shrimp roll and Macanese caramelized egg tart, both glorious. The shrimp roll has a wicked crunch from being rolled in sesame, and a moist, dense shrimp-meat filling. The egg tart has a flaky crust and a soft, warm custardy inside, so good it's almost sexual.
The left half of the menu is mostly salty or savory, the right half sweet. One of the best from the sweet side is honey-and-red-date pudding, three pale red cubes that look like 21st-century Jell-O. Another one not to miss is silky tofu with ginger syrup, but if that sounds too weird, then there are always fried bananas.
Any time you come in here, you'll see Chinese families at round tables, small groups of friends socializing, and even singles. Westerners tend to eat and run. In Chinese society, a dim-sum lunch is as much about the schmoozing as the food, so take it slow.