Offbeat Eats

One of the nice things about visiting London is that it is one of those metropolitan cities that still has a real Chinatown (well, like most any Chinatown, it is in constant flux and has a mixed history, like how it’s also the home of some of the French historical sites, like the Church of Notre Dame De France), and that means a chance for dim sum. This wasn’t our first London Chinatown dim sum foray (that being New World Chinese a few years back), but more than a few of London’s more reputable review sites all age that Imperial China is the ne plus ultra of London dim sum joints (hey, I can use French, it’s literally across the street from the French church!). So when my brother and I wanted to take my parents out for a Sunday dinner after church, we wandered over to Chinatown to check out Imperial China.

Our US-based route from New Hampshire to Detroit also had us passing through Cleveland at lunchtime. While we were coming back to Cleveland for three days later in the trip, I figured this would be a good opportunity to check out someplace towards the East side of town, perhaps towards China Town. In fact, we had both been craving dim sum for a while, and Cleveland has more than a few dim sum joints, so I figured I’d give one a try. However, from past experience, I know that they vary greatly in quantity, price, and authenticity, so I decided to check out my friend Nancy’s blog, Fun Playing With Food, and see if she had any recommendations. And upon reading her recent review of Emperor’s Palace, it sounded like it was worth checking out.

I rather enjoy the fact the Boston has a reasonable good Chinatown, although like most “Chinatowns” over the last several decades it has really become more of a “Pan Asian Town” than just Chinese places, with a particularly strong Vietnamese and Korean presence as well. But it’s still the home to several well-regarded Chinese restaurants. In particular, Gourmet Dumpling House and Hei La Moon have both been on my “hit list” for a while… but they’ve both foiled my past attempts at dining, either through being intractably busy (well, it didn’t help that I didn’t check the calendar last time, and showed up the bay before Chinese New Year last time) or arriving just after they stopped serving. But I’ve been trying to get back there. Well, two weekends ago, I finally had a good opportunity: our friend Bridget wanted to celebrate her birthday with an outing to Boston. So we all piled in two cars with a bunch of friends, and stop number one was… dim sum at Hei La Moon…

We celebrated Boxing Day in London by doing some more wandering about town. One of the places we checked out was London’s Chinatown. While a lot smaller and more compact than the Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, and Montreal that I’ve recently experienced, it does sport a quite impressive number of Asian markets, and more importantly, restaurants. So we used this as a good opportunity to check out New World Chinese Restaurant, one of London’s better-known (and older) Dim Sum restaurants.

After several days of eating some (admittedly very good) Mexican-themed food at a conference in Palm Desert, I was ready to have some Asian flavors instead. For some reason, I was craving dim sum, and, unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be any dim sum places in Palm Springs/Palm Desert. Until I searched Google more carefully. Turns out the Supreme Dragon, while being in general your typical Chinese restaurant, has a reasonably good menu of dim sum items as appetizers, including a dim sum platter