Restaurant: Dim Sum House
Location: 1822 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025. (310) 441-9651
Date: August 20, 2019
Cuisine: Chinese Dim Sum
Rating: Mediocre but theoretically fast
Dim Sum House is a newish strip mall take on dim sum.
It’s just in the mini-mall, right south of Santa Monica Blvd, on Westwood — next to the little Pharmacy and dry cleaners. I think it’s owned by the same people as Hop Woo.
The interior is very Chinese — could be in the SGV — but it’s not. Oddly, even though it was about 1pm, there wasn’t a soul in here except for the loan employee (behind the counter).
The daytime dim sum menu.
This is an interesting sort of place. By day, it’s a small (greatest hits) classic Cantonese dim sum menu. I think at night they have skewers.
Har Gow (shrimp dumplings). Probably the best item. Fairly typical, but kinda limp and chewy.
Shu Mai (pork and shrimp dumplings). These looked hideous and tasted better, but not great. A bit mealy.
XLB (soup dumplings). Pasty skins. Filling was okay.
Pan fried bun. Basically the same pork filling, but with a very heavy chewy exterior. Filling was good and I picked that out.
My service experience was very weird here — and not in a good way. I was the only person. Staff person was eating themselves when I came in. Very slow to notice me. Slow to take my order. Then I waited. And waited. After quite a while 2 of the items above came out. Girl just sat behind the counter on her phone. Eventually she brought two more items. I had to get up and ask her for necessities like chopsticks and napkins. Then I waited for some more. The 5th item never came. I went up and asked. She checked in kitchen and told me it was coming. She rang up my bill. I waited. Eventually I asked again and she checked again and then told me “they were out of it.” She had to refund me the money even. Clearly not very concerned about customer service. Staff in back were probably eating and smoking too rather than steaming the dumplings — which clearly were made long in advance, or maybe just frozen.
They didn’t taste great either. Now it’s sort of like bad pizza in that it’s not THAT bad, but for dim sum it was quite lousy. I like the idea of this kind of quick smaller format — which Tim Ho Wan is doing also — but the execution was abysmal.