A month and a half ago my mom’s side of the family gathered to celebrate the lunar new year. As my brother and sister-in-law also wanted to show their newly remodeled house, the decision was made to go up to Irvine and have dinner at the Irvine branch of Meizhou Dongpo.
For background information: Meizhou Dongpo is a chain of moderately upscale restaurants from Mainland China. They have dozens, if not hundreds, of locations in Mainland China and have grown their presence in the United States, mostly in metro Los Angeles. Their signature dish is the Beijing style roast duck (or Peking duck for most Americans).
We made a reservation for 6:30 but were able to get seated a little early as they held our table of 12 in advance. Immediately the servers asked if we wanted to place an order for duck and what order did we want (I believe we settled on a half duck). The duck takes a little while to prepare, presumably because of how popular it is, so they take your order for that as early as possible. They are so attentive to the duck question that no less than 3 different servers asked us 4 times in the span of 15 minutes to confirm that we had placed our duck order already. It’s that serious.
We ordered a number of other dishes as well, which you can see in my review below. Mind you, we also attempted to order both fresh crab and a whole fish, but the market price was extraordinarily expensive. The crab went for $35 per pound and the fish was $59(!) a pound. Given that, we quickly canceled both. With that out of the way, here were the dishes we did eat:
Meizhou Roast Duck
Meizhou Roast Duck (half) – Unlike most Cantonese seafood restaurants you find in the US, Meizhou Dongpo correctly used the thin crepes (as opposed to thick mantou buns) you’d find in Beijing. The duck is good with light seasoning and freshly julienned scallions and sauce. I don’t think it’s the best Beijing style duck I’ve had (that would probably go to Berkeley’s Great China) but it is pretty good.
Sole Filet with Scallions – This is what we ended up ordering instead of the live fish and it was pretty good. It had a creamy-dish sauce that was mild but tasty and there were some very nicely cooked bean sprouts
Dongpo Pork Belly with Preserved Vegetables – pork belly was very tender and the sauce hit just the right notes of being both slightly sweet but savory. The preserved vegetables were decent but could have used slightly more bit
Stir Fried String Beans & Mapo Tofu
Stir-Fried Pea Tips – Honestly this dish is really hard to mess up. I couldn’t complain with the copious use of garlic
Wok-Fried String Beans – These were so good that my brother decided to order them twice. The string beans wok fried til just blistering with a general helping of garlic and peppers
Stir-Fried Mushrooms – I really liked the stir fried mushrooms. It was a mix of a couple different mushrooms (like white mushrooms and shiitakes) with a generous amount of garlic and what seemed to be a savory source with soy and hoisin
Mapo Tofu – The flavors of the maps tofu were generally good, if not the most spectacular that I had. It could have been a little spicier and had some male flavor, but it was not bad
Sautéed Diced Beef Filet with Black Pepper – The beef was pretty tender and nicely seasoned. Portions, however, were a little small
Cucumber Salad – This is one of my brother’s favorites. It’s very nicely pickled, though I think they could be even better with a little kick of heat with them
Sole Filet with Scallions
Despite the sticker shock of the crab and fish at the beginning, the food was great, if a little expensive. I would definitely order the duck, mushrooms, string beans, and fish fillets again. However, it was well worth it for the meal celebrating THE biggest holiday on the Chinese calendar. While Irvine has a plethora of Chinese and Taiwanese food, Meizhou Dongpo is a rare place in the area for upscale food for a family meal.
It’s been months since I wrote a blog post, since the pandemic has really made my normal blog staples, reviewing different restaurants, virtually impossible. I thought about writing a blog post on what restaurants are open to outdoor dining, but I am wary about tacitly endorsing dining, even outdoors, in the midst of a new surge and plateau of cases in much of the US.
So instead, I figured I would write about my personal favorite Chinatowns in North America that I’ve been to, why I like them, and which of my favorite restaurants are still open for takeout. The order is loosely based on my preference but don’t fret, even if I left yours out, I still love all Chinatowns.
San Gabriel Valley (LA), CA
Kaya (Coconut Jam) Pastry at Longo Seafood in the SGV
I admit, I am a little biased given that I have traveled to the San Gabriel Valley (aka the “SGV” or “626”) since I was a kid, as it was often the area where we could get better dim sum and Chinese groceries that were harder or more expensive to find in San Diego. That said, the SGV is one of the largest “Chinatowns” in North America encompassing hundreds of square miles and dozens of different cities just east of Los Angeles and can probably be divided into 2: the west San Gabriel Valley centered in the cities of Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, and San Gabriel, and the east San Gabriel Valley around the communities of Diamond Bar, Rowland Heights, and Walnut.
Unlike historic Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York City with their dense streets and small alleys, the San Gabriel Valley is filled with sprawling suburbs centered on commercial corridors jam packed with Chinese strip malls along Valley Blvd, Garvey Ave, Colima Rd, and other streets. Partially because of such vastness, over the last 50 years the SGV has been an area where successive waves of immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China have been able to settle and set up new businesses. This allows a continual wave of new competition and trends from China to emerge, which also keeps old standbys on their toes to better their offerings or potentially be replaced fairly soon.
It’s also a fairly young place, with a pretty dynamic and ever evolving Chinese American culture that help popularize emerging Asian American trends in the United States like boba/bubble tea 20-30 years ago. (yes, bubble tea has been in the US for that long!) This Fung Bros “The 626” video typifies how this culture was like 10 years ago.
So where are some of the places to order takeout in the best Chinatown in North America? See below:
The Bay Cafe – One of the SGV’s better known and regarded Hong Kong style cafes serves a good Hong Kong milk tea and a cornucopia of other great Hong Kong staples. Order on DoorDash or Uber Eats
Bistro Na’s – Michelin starred Bistro Na’s in Temple City serves self proclaimed “imperial court food” that is nonetheless vary delicious, like the Crispy Shrimp and Na’s Spicy Chicken. You can order online via their website, DoorDash, or Grubhub
Elite Restaurant – One of the SGV’s best places for dim sum is now open for takeout again on DoorDash
HaiDiLao Hot Pot – Takeout hot pot you say? Yes, it exists (and I can report that it’s really doable if you got a pot and burner/hot plate at home) and you can order from this popular, and expensive, Chinese chain on virtually all the delivery platforms.
Mian – Chengdu Taste’s sibling restaurant with a tasty assortment of noodles is available for takeout on Uber Eats
Sea Harbour – Constantly evolving and standard setting Cantonese and dim sum specialist Sea Harbour is open for takeout. Given them a call at 626-288-3939
Savoy Kitchen – This perennial chicken rice favorite is available to order togo. Just give them a call at 626-308-9535
Yin Ji Chang Fen – The San Gabriel outpost of this Guangzhou style rice noodle roll chain accepts orders on DoorDash and Uber Eats
Richmond (Vancouver), BC
Lamb Fried Dumplings at Yue Restaurant
While great Chinese food can be found nearly all over Vancouver, the best in the Lower Mainland is concentrated in the southern suburb of Vancouver. While the San Gabriel Valley’s strength is in its wide and continually evolving breadth of regional cuisines, Richmond’s strength lies in its particular depth of one regional cuisine: Cantonese.
It’s not to say you can’t find great places serving other regional Chinese cuisines in Richmond, but the particular depth of Cantonese cuisine here lies in its unique history. As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong approached, many wealthy Hong Kongers feared what might change in a PRC controlled Hong Kong and promptly found ways to immigrant. One of the easiest options was to get investment visas in Canada, and thus tens of thousands of Hong Kongers and their children moved and settled to Richmond. They brought along and could entice good chefs from Hong Kong which helped increase the quality of Cantonese food in the region, so much so that many restaurants in the 2000s to mid 2010s were close or at the level of their counterparts in Hong Kong.
More recently, arrivals from mainland China have helped expanded the number of good regional options available, but not to the level of SGV yet, and it remains to be seen on how Hong Kong’s latest political turbulence will mean for even more food and immigration to Canada. That said, some of my favorites are:
HK BBQ Master – This was always basically a big takeout restaurant, so you can still get their excellent Cantonese style roast meats in person
Mama’s Dumpling and Coffee – Renown for their xiaolongbao, you can get these delicious orders for takeout
Silver Tower – Old school Hong Kong Style Cafe serves the best comfort food that you can order on DoorDash
Sun Sui Wah – A couple of my friends recently dined here (BC’s COVID rates are significantly better than the US, though I’d still be pretty hesitant) and the food seems just as great as pre-pandemic, which you can order on Skip the Dishes.
Yue Restaurant – One of my favorite dim sum spots in Richmond is open for takeout via DoorDash
Flushing (New York City), NY
Liang Pi at Xi’an Famous Foods (which started in Flushing)
The sights and sounds of Canal and Mott Streets in Manhattan Chinatown may get much of the spotlight in New York City, but I say that the best New York Chinatown is a hop uptown and a 7 line subway ride away to Flushing in Queens.
In contrast to the SGV and Richmond’s sprawling strip malls, Flushing is a decidedly urban Chinatown, densely packed along Main Street and its side streets and allies. You can find a variety of Chinese regional cuisines here too, especially in the few densely packed mall food courts like the New World Mall (though not sure how open they might or will be with the COVID-19 pandemic). However, many of the main stars in Flushing are Taiwanese, Fujianese, and Shanghainese and some of my favorite memories in New York City are of walking down Main St with various friends and cousins sipping on boba and eating street food.
Here are a few great places currently open for takeout:
Hunan Cafe – Order some authentic Hunanese food for takeout via Seamless or Uber Eats
Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao – You can order some of the best soup dumplings in the city online through their website
Nurlan Uygher Restaurant – One of NYC’s first Uygher restaurants is open for takeout by looking at their menu and calling 347-542-3324
Xing Fu Tang – I couldn’t write about Flushing without a bubble tea recommendation right? Well get some Brown Sugar Boba Milk from this new kid on the block that replaced the old Red House on Seamless, Uber Eats, or DoorDash
Yi Fang Taiwan Fruit Tea – I love Yi Fang Fruit Tea for their endless array of delectable fruit teas, which you can order on Seamless and DoorDash
The Richmond (San Francisco), CA
Juicy Pork Xiao Long Bao at Dragon Beaux
There are numerous Chinatowns in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in my opinion the Richmond District in the western part of the city is the best Chinatown in the region.
Why? Unlike San Francisco’s historic Chinatown, the Richmond is a little less touristy but packs in the bustle as much as you’d find on Stockton St. Clement St and Geary St have a large selection of Chinese restaurants, supermarkets, and other businesses, including my favorite dim sum place, Dragon Beaux.
Here are some places to try ordering from in the Richmond:
Dragon Beaux – The aforementioned Dragon Beaux is available for takeout on Uber Eats or Grubhub, but you could also give them a call and order their frozen dim sum to reheat yourself to perfection
HoDaLa – From beef noodle soup to popcorn chicken, this Taiwanese favorite can be ordered for takeout or delivery via its website.
Jiangnan Cuisine – Cuisine from the area just north of Shanghai in Jiangsu province can be found on DoorDash, Grubhub, or Postmates
Kowloon Tong Dessert Cafe – This no frills cha chaan teng is ready to serve you some delicious Hong Kong milk tea or basic Hong Kong style western food and deserts on nearly all delivery apps
Tasty Pot – Taiwanese hot pot chain Tasty Pot is available for your individualized hot pot needs via takeout or delivery on DoorDash or Uber Eats
Manhattan Chinatown (New York City), NY
Food at Noodle Village
The only historic Chinatown on my list is New York City. Why Manhattan’s historic Chinatown you ask, instead of other ones like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, or even my hometown of Oakland? The simple reason is that unlike the others, it’s a perfect combination of history, mix of shops, and an area where both old Chinese families from Guangdong, recent arrivals from Fujian, and tourists alike can mix and mingle with ease. San Francisco’s Chinatown, sadly, feels very weirdly divided between tourist and trinket shop dominated Grant St and local market and restaurant focused Stockton St.
So if you’re in or near Manhattan, here are some places open for takeout!
Carol’s Bun – Located in the East Broadway part of Chinatown, this no-frills Fujianese places is perfect for some affordable takeout
Cha Chan Tang – One of the original cha chaan tengs in the city serves up comfort Hong Kong style western food like macaroni soup and curry chicken that you can get on DoorDash or Seamless
Kong Sihk Tong – Feast upon all sorts of Hong Kong style foods by getting some takeout via phone at 646-850-6140
Noodle Village – My favorite comfort Cantonese spot in Manhattan Chinatown is available for takeout or delivery on virtually all the delivery apps
Wo Hop – Want some old school Chinese American food? Like so old that the restaurant has been around for 80+ years? Look no further than Chinatown staple Wo Hop to grab some Chinese American takeout
Houston Chinatown, TX
Dinner at Fung’s Kitchen
I think many folks tend to think of big historic and even suburban Chinatowns as being exclusively a West Coast or East Coast thing, but one of the largest Chinatowns in the country is, in fact, in Houston! Centered on Bellaire Blvd. east of Beltway 8, Houston Chinatown is similar to what you would find along Valley Blvd in the SGV or heavily Chinese cities in the Silicon Valley around Sunnyvale and Cupertino. There’s a mix of Hong Kong, mainland Chinese, and Vietnamese Chinese people in Houston that also makes Houston’s Chinatown a little unique. Houston’s Little Saigon is also just to the west of Beltway 8.
I’ve only been to Houston Chinatown once, but here’s some places that are still open for takeout:
Fung’s Kitchen – The only one of the places on this list I’ve actually dined in, you can get your craving of dim sum filled here through ordering takeout or on DoorDash or Uber Eats (I hear they are taking COVID precautions pretty seriously too!)
House of Bowls – One of Houston’s cha chaan tengs seems well beloved with a variety of Hong Kong style dishes available for takeout
Mala Sichuan Bistro – The authentic flavors of Sichuan can be had by ordering takeout on their website as well as Uber Eats
Mein – Classic Cantonese food, including the namesake noodles and noodle soups, can be found for takeout at this well regarded spot
One Dragon – For Shanghainese xiao long bao and their crispy bottom cousins, sheng jian bao, order takeout here
Honorary Mentions:
I didn’t include pan-Asian areas just so it was clearer/cleaner. However, there are a few pan-Asian districts (places where there’s more of a mix of different pan-Asian shops, restaurants, and markets) that I really love.
International District (Seattle), WA – The most recent non-Bay Area Asian district I’ve been to, the International District, is a historic Japanese and Chinese area that has a great diversity of different Asian cuisines just southeast of downtown Seattle.
Irvine (outside of LA), CA – I went to college in Irvine and loved being able to eat all sorts of Taiwanese food here as many Taiwanese families settled in Irvine in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kearny Mesa (San Diego), CA – Yes, I’m biased in that I grew up in San Diego, but Kearny Mesa, especially on Convoy St, was the area I grew up eating dim sum, Korean BBQ, yakitori, and other variety of Asian food. Mira Mesa, historically a large neighborhood of Filipino and Vietnamese folks, is also a great pan Asian area to visit in San Diego as well.
Mesa (Phoenix), AZ – While Mesa leans more toward Vietnamese and Vietnamese Chinese folks, it’s a great place to eat and shop all types of Asian cuisines. I always made it a point to stop in Mesa on my ways to/from Albuquerque to/from my visits seeing family in Southern California
Whenever I talk to someone about this blog, sometimes I’m asked why it’s called sinoinsocal. I mean, sure, I am Chinese but I certainly don’t live in Southern California. So what gives with this sort-of odd name?
Well let’s back track all the way back to 2011, a year and a half before I published my first post. As some of my readers know (and as it is outlined on my “about” page), my blog is dedicated in honor of my mom and it was in the fall of 2011 that my mom had a couple of severe strokes that precipitated to her passing in 2012. Because of her strokes, I immediately moved from Baltimore back to Southern California.
Pho Ga at Pho Nguyen Hue
More specifically, I moved back to Irvine, where I graduated from college a couple years prior. It was during my time in college that I ate around Orange County amazingly diverse and large Asian communities. Whether it was some of the best pho I’ve ever had in Little Saigon or the most delicious bowls of beef noodle soup in Irvine’s various Taiwanese restaurants, eating Asian food in Orange County was such a delight.
But of course, most people’s vision of Orange County is something akin to what they have seen in the hit mid-2000s show “The OC” or the original version of The Real Housewives series set in the gated community of Coto de Caza. That is to say, the popular image is of rich white people with sun kissed skin, money for everything they want, and lots of time spent frolicking on the beach or shopping at high end malls. And while this kind of life is definitely representative of parts of Orange County, it’s really just a small portion of what, in reality, is one of the most diverse counties in the United States.
Dim sum at J Zhou Oriental Cuisine
Orange County is home of the largest Vietnamese community in the United States with nearly 190,000 Vietnamese residents. You can see the large Vietnamese presence when you drive on streets like Bolsa and Brookhurst where strip mall after strip mall are filled with Vietnamese shops and restaurants. Right next door is Garden Grove, with a large Korean community and some of the best Korean BBQ in Southern California. And just 15-20 minutes down the 405 or 5 (without traffic) is Irvine, where a huge Taiwanese community means there are multiple great places to get everything from Taiwanese fried chicken cutlets to bowls of lu rou fan. This doesn’t even include the large Persian and Latino communities in the county too.
So when I moved back to Southern California in the fall of 2011 to be closer to my mom, I wanted to showcase another side of Orange County, one filled with bowls of tasty pho instead of fake tans. Unfortunately, an opportunity to work a campaign for a now wonderful Congresswoman (and one of my best bosses ever) and my mom’s cardiac arrest and eventual passing meant I wouldn’t write a blog post until I lived in Denver.
Though with all those twists and turns (and 2 more moves later), I still think that more people should know about the wonderful Asian food that dots Orange County. Thankfully, a few other food writers with a more national audience has done that too. So before you head to Disneyland on your next trip, be sure to check out David Chan’sarticle and guide to Chinese food in Irvineor the Orange County Register’sguide to Little Saigon.
And if you want to know what are some of my favorite places in Orange County, here are a few below:
Broddard Restaurant – Great Vietnamese restaurant in Little Saigon
Cham Sut Gol – Wonderful Korean BBQ in Garden Grove
J Zhou Oriental Cuisine – The best dim sum in Orange County, almost rivaling those in the San Gabriel Valley
Pho Nguyen Hue – Some of the best chicken pho I’ve ever had
For my sister’s 16th birthday I took her to Disneyland. On the way up to Anaheim the night before our Disney adventures, I asked her what she wanted to eat and she said Korean BBQ. Because we were running a little late to Orange County, instead of going to the delicious Korean BBQ restaurants in Garden Grove that can close early, we decided to go to All The Barbecue in Irvine instead.
We arrived in Irvine a little before 9PM and the pungent, fragrant smells of Korean BBQ immediately hit my nose. We sat down and they promptly set the table with a new grill top, salad, and banchan. Additionally they gave us a menu of all the items you can order with cute names including “Skinny Dipping Cow,” a plate of thinly sliced beef to cook on the grill that pairs well with their dipping sauce, and “Don’t Rib Me Off,” a plate of two long, juicy pieces of marinated galbi [beef short rib]. Since it is all you can eat, we ordered a bunch of different items to try including:
All That BBQ in Irvine
Skinny Dipping Cow [thinly sliced beef] – The beef slices were great and cooked really fast. It was mostly meat but had just enough fat that cooking it a little longer on the grill didn’t make it too tough of dry.
Don’t Rib Me Off [galbi / marinated beef short rib] – I loved the marinade on this galbi and the short rib is thin enough that it doesn’t take too long to grill it. The only downside is that they only give you two pieces at a time.
Hotty Piggy [Spicy pork] – I loved the flavor of the spicy marinade which helped to keep the pork flavorful even if it was cooked a tad too long.
Tried and True [bulgogi / marinated thinly sliced beef] – The marinade was nice but perhaps a little too oily for my taste. While it did taste nice, I did notice that if left on the grill a little too long the pieces charred and became grisly a little too quickly.
Let My Egg Go [steamed egg] – This was probably the worst dish in that the steamed egg seemed a little under-cooked and it came to the table lukewarm. Nonetheless it was still a nice balance to soak up the meat juices and salad dressing.
Green Land [various vegetables] – The vegetable plate came with 2 slices of eggplant, a few slices of potato, 2 slices of mushrooms, rings and rings of onions, and 2 cucumbers. I liked the mushrooms and grilled cucumbers but the others didn’t do too much for me.
Speak Your Beefy Mind [Beef Tongue] – These were thinly sliced and quick to cook allowing the tongue to come out pretty tender after 30 or so seconds off the grill. Not my top recommendation given the other great items, but definitely something I’d try as well.
At the end we were happily stuffed and ready to continue our journey to the Happiest Place on Earth. It also helped that the dinner price was $21.99 per person which is pretty reasonably given the fancy Irvine digs and the quality of meat compared to other Korean BBQ places. Definitely a place to stop by if you’re in Irvine and craving lots of meat.
A little over a month ago, when I linked to my blog post on Red Egg on Facebook, I made a half-serious joke about how should I have a “dim sum bracket” akin to Nate Silver’s “Burrito Bracket” on his FiveThirtyEight site. The burrito bracket,as Silver explains, was born out of his love of burritos and his then-recent 2007 move to the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He then started a food blog to document his search the best burrito in the neighborhood, NCAA March Madness style. However, his work for Baseball Prospectus and start of what would become FiveThirtyEight deferred his search in the middle of the bracket.
I was really captivated by Silver’s relaunch of the Burrito Bracket as a nationwide search to find out what was the “best” burrito in the country. Thus, I decided to actually launch my half-serious joke into a project to find the restaurant that serves the “best” dim sum in the country (and when I mean dim sum, I mean the Cantonese style food and not others that may market itself as dim sum).
Egg Custard Tarts at Sea Harbour
Of course, I don’t have Silver’s access to staff journalists, researchers, or a veritable selection committee of food journalists and celebrity chefs. However, I did have access to public access to crowd sourcing restaurant review sites, Chowhound discussion forums, and the online publications of numerous rankings of dim sum from various metropolitan areas. So I started similar to how Silver started his revived Burrito Bracket – Yelp.
Yelp scores and numbers of reviews may be a decent baseline, but even Silver himself acknowledges the potential flaws in Yelp. Renown Chinese food eater David Chan goes even further to describe theflaws of Yelp when searching for Chinese restaurants. Thus, I decided factor in other websites in creating my rankings, most notably Urbanspoon. Urbanspoon isn’t without its own flaws, but its another crowd sourcing restaurant view site used nationwide and I thought it would help balance some of the downsides of using Yelp. In addition, I factored in “bonus points” for the number of times a restaurant had been ranked as part of a list of best dim sum places in a metropolitan areas in the last two years by a food journalist and/or Chowhound. No ranking system is perfect, of course, but I thought that might be the best way in having a relatively objective rating system.
Critiques of the rating system (and scores for that matter) will be saved for another post, however, as I want to talk about some initial findings that I think are pretty fascinating in their own right.
In my search for the restaurant serving the best dim sum in America, I did a lot of scouring to find all these restaurants. All in all, I found at least 494 restaurants serving dim sum across 57 of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. I got to 57 by searching for dim sum restaurants in both the 50 largest cities in America and the 50 largest metropolitan areas as defined by the Census Bureau. Honolulu falls below 50 in both categories, but has a significant population of those identifying as a person with Chinese descent so I included it too. In total, these metro areas account for 85% of all American residents that identify as Chinese in the 2010 census.
Dim sum restaurant v. number of Chinese residents scatterplot
Afterward, I was curious to see the correlation between the amount of Chinese identified Americans in a metropolitan area and the amount of restaurants in the metropolitan area that serves dim sum. As you might think would be fairly logical, in general there is a pretty big correlation between the two. Using rudimentary and free statistics software by the website Alcula (as I don’t have access to SPSS, STATA, or other more sophisticated software), I found that the correlation coefficient between the two is pretty dramatic at 0.946 as you can see from the scatter plot above.
While that doesn’t come as much of a surprise, I was interested to see which metropolitan areas matched closest to the regression line and which were significant outliers. The two metropolitan areas that looked most in line were Washington, DC, at 13 restaurants serving dim sum in a population with 106,721 Chinese people, and Dallas-Fort Worth, at 8 restaurants serving dim sum in a population with 55,568 Chinese people. Beyond those two metropolitan areas, I would say a vast majority of the other metropolitan areas were pretty close to the region with just a few major outliers.
The few outliers, however, were pretty significant. The most significant outliers, in fact, looked to have a lot MORE restaurants serving dim sum than their Chinese population would otherwise suggest. The two biggest in this case were the San Francisco Bay Area, with 72 restaurants serving dim sum in an area with just 649,496 Chinese people, and Seattle, with 33 restaurants serving dim sum for an area with just 100,763 Chinese people. This can be explained by the fact that both cities retain significant numbers of people with ancestry from Guangdong Province and/or ties to Hong Kong. Furthermore, both cities not only retain a significant and vibrant Chinatown filled with Cantonese families, unlike their counterparts in places like Los Angeles or Washington, DC, but they also have suburban areas with a significant number of Cantonese families are restaurants, like Bellevue in Seattle and Millbrae in San Francisco.
Dim Sum at Koi Palace
In contrast to San Francisco and Seattle is New York City, which has only 53 restaurants serving dim sum in the metropolitan area that is home to 705,721 Chinese people. This can also be explained by Chinese immigration patterns as the predominant majority of Chinese people that have immigrated to New York since the Immigration Act of 1965 have been from non-Cantonese areas of China, especially from Fujian, Taiwan, and Zhejiang. While the core of what most people see as Manhattan’s Chinatown is still predominantly Cantonese, it is dwarfed by Flushing’s much more diverse pan-Chinese Chinatown and is even smaller in land area than the Fujianese side of Manhattan Chinatown, just east of Bowery and along East Broadway.
Sacramento and San Diego also have less places serving dim sum as their Chinese populations would indicate. As a native San Diegan, my theory is that many Chinese families are willing to drive a couple hours to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, for their fix of really good dim sum on any given three day weekend.
Regardless, I feel the best finding in all my research is that in nearly every major metropolitan area of the United States, you won’t be far from a place that serves dim sum, most of them at least decent. Even in Albuquerque, with just a few thousand Chinese people, I’m never really more than a 20 minute drive from eating dim sum at Ming Dynasty.
SINO IN SOCAL 