gnat dims and sums

for a person who loves food as much as i do, there are some pretty inexcusable gaps in my realm of food experience. i took care of one of the biggest very recently with a quick field trip back to:

chinatown. somehow i made it 25 years without ever having been to dim sum. andrew had a craving and said he knew a place, so we headed to phoenix right off the red line.

usually when i write about new foods i like to do some background research first. unfortunately the only interesting tidbit wikipedia has to offer about dim sum is that it's linked with an older tradition, yum cha (tea tasting), in which tea was served with small snacks. thankfully, over centuries the snacks served with the tea took over the show and now we have dim sum. don't get me wrong, i love tea. i just love snacks more.

the photos that follow are of food, all of which was delicious. unfortunately none of the contents of anything we ate were really explained to us, everything was just set on our table with the assumption we wanted it. (this is mostly an exaggeration. i still can't tell you what any of it is.)

shrimp?

...potstickers.

dumpling. and sauce. wonderful wonderful sauce.

shrimp roll. probably.

bbq pork bun. problematic, as they gave us three buns for four people. see unsuccessful attempt to rectify the situation below.

ribs. (pretty confident on this one.)

sesame balls filled with lotus paste. i know they don't look like balls so much as wedges, that's because the woman who brought them busted out a pair of kitchen shears and annihilated them at the table.

at the end of the meal you're glad the table is covered in paper, because they've only given you one of each type of sauce and you've dripped it everywhere while reaching over all of the little plates to dip things.

while i was in chinatown i also stopped in a little grocery store to grab some cooking paraphernalia (sesame oil, mirin, rice vinegar) for mere dollars. i want to shop there all the time.

so it turns out i don't have a lot of exciting things to say about dim sum except that it was delicious. i liked everything i ate (even if i didn't know exactly what it was), i didn't spend too many dollars, and i was full but not so full i wanted to die. 

maybe next time i take pictures of food to blog about i'll write down what it is.