San Francisco is known for its food culture and one type of dining is truly unique: Dim Sum. Dim Sum is a type of Chinese food style, where bite sized portions of foods come to you already cooked and you choose what you want to order. It is fun and a different type of experience to eating. And if you aren’t sure what is going on, you are certainly up for some surprises.
We had Dim Sum twice. The first time was in a fancy restaurant that my sister and I happened upon. We at were the only people there at first, and the waitress came with menus. When we asked for Dim Sum she rolled out a cart of faux food, explained to us what was what, and let us point to what we wanted. Then our food was brought out. This is not a traditional Dim Sum experience, but it was good as our first one to get a feel of how things worked.
Our second experience was not as orderly. We decided to find the local’s Dim Sum, where things weren’t artificial or fancy. And we succeeded in that point. We found a busy restaurant full of locals and where the staff were hard to understand. We waited for a table, the last one in the corner. Let me tell you, you don’t want to be the last table in a Dim Sum restaurant. The key reasons why is that the food isn’t as fresh when it gets to you, and the more popular dishes will have already been snapped up. But we didn’t know this, and couldn’t understand the server when we asked what was in each dish. So we haphazardly just starting to get one or two items from each cart, not knowing what it was. I kept waiting for the main dishes, but we seem to only get the desert and random dishes to us. It was always a surprise when you put in the first bite, not knowing what it was. By the time the main dishes came out we were already stuffed and had to pass on them. It was chaos, but boy was it fun to try out all those new things! I would recommend trying tit out if you ever get the chance!
Read More at:
Travel Missteps is an every-other week series on how sometimes part of the journey is making mistakes and getting lost.
Leave a Reply