Dim Sum at Golden Sea City 金城

Update: This restaurant has closed.

Mom and I haven’t been to dim sum for quite a while since our schedules haven’t been matching up quite as nicely lately.

So when a chance finally came we went to one of her favorite places: Golden Sea City.

Golden Sea City and its predecessor were favorites of ours.   They are cheap, and they’re probably one of the only dim sum restaurants left that still does the carts.  It’s kind of sad that this tradition is giving way to checklists and efficiency haha.  The carts are likely the reason we keep coming back.

This is also a place that offers mostly traditional dim sum stuff, such as the above.  Nowadays dim sum restaurants serve so much new-age stuff that to quote my aunt, “It’s not dim sum anymore!!”.

An example was when we went to Red Star, we didn’t order any shao mai (steamed pork dumplings with the yellow skin), ha gao(steamed shrimp dumpling) or san jok ao yok (steamed beef balls with bean curd), which are the epitome of dim sum.  My aunt goes on to say, “It doesn’t even feel like we are having dum sum!”

By the way, the chicken feet were delicious.  They were well-done in that the skin comes off the bones very easily, and the knuckles are easily bitten off.

Here’s the Pan-fried shrimp dumplings with chives.  It was a bit on the lukewarm side, which is inevitable with the cart system.  However there were a lot of big pieces of shrimp in it and it was also very fragrant of chives.  So nonetheless it was still very good.

A staple of dim sum trips is the Rice Roll with Beef.  I was disappointed with this one though because there was NO taste to the beef at all.  Usually other places will flavor it with either cilantro or preserved peel, but not here.  It was just blah.  The skin was a bit dried also this time.

Now this is something that Golden Sea City (and its predecessor) is famous for.  You can see the whole thing in the first picture on the cart.  It’s called a jin dui (?) and basically it’s a deep-fried glutinous rice ball that’s puffed up.  I don’t think there’s any other place that has this fresh made.  It’s really good.  I think of it as a dessert since it’s sweet.  One order comes with 3 big ones.  My Mom and Dad love this.

This is the only dim sum restaurant that I’ve seen to offer Portuguese-style egg tarts.  Can you believe this is actually my FIRST time trying it?  I’ve never known what the difference between this and regular egg tart is, but judging from this place, there seems to be more milk in the Portuguese-style than the regular style.  It was very good.  We’ve started to order this every time we come here.

Summary

Reviewer

Wendy

Review Date

2009-09-02

What Was Reviewed

Golden Sea City Dim Sum

Author Rating

4