Restaurant: Five Star Seafood Restaurant
Location: 140 W Valley Blvd, San Gabriel, CA 91776. (626) 288-1899
Date: July 9, 2022
Cuisine: Chinese Dim Sum
Rating: Meh
Once or twice a year the hedonists (and Yarom’s family) trek’s out to the SGV for a two part Saturday featuring dim sum and some banquet dinner. Locations vary but several times we’ve been to the awesome Juicy Dumpling.
This is the same maxi-mall with Juicy Dumpling and Spicy City (now sadly closed I think). 5 Star has a comanding position in the corner, high above everything else (you need to take an elevator up above the market).
It’s a giant room with a decent view, classic Cantonese.
And a cart place. I haven’t been to a cart place in a while and 5 Star reminded me why.
Our table.
Pan fried meat and chive patties. Oily and delicious.
Greens. Just were. Not much garlic.
Red bean sesame balls. One of the problems with carts is the totally random order. Actually it’s not random, it’s bad to better.
Fried shrimp paste balls on sugar sticks. Luke warm (or even cool) by the time we got them.
Disgusting pig trotters the way Yarom likes ’em.
Chicken Feet. Same deal as the pig’s feet.
Pork ribblets. Pretty tasty, if boney.
XLB. Doughy version and not very warm at all, but still tasty.
Veggie roll. This is normally a great dish — here a bit meh.
Eggplant stuffed with fried shrimp paste. Not so great. They love the shrimp paste here.
DEEP fried wontons with mayo.
A different deep fried roll, I think with shrimp paste — and more mayo.
Yet another deep fried roll with mayo. Hard to tell the difference, maybe different (fried) wrapper.
Lotus Sticky Rice. They do have all the classics here.
Siu Mai. Took us a long time to get these and even when we did they were luke warm. They were passable.
Scrawny.
Beef ball. Very “processed” and almost sweet like a jewish meatball.
Chive and shrimp dumpling. One of the best dishes. Somehow, despite this being a dim sum place, I basically had to ambush the dumpling carts at the kitchen and rip the steamed dumplings out of their hands — they were very determined to push more over-fried stuff.
Har gow. Very hard to get, surprisingly, and just fine.
Baked pork bun (char siu bao). Ok. You can see from the picture it’s a bit flabby.
Pineapple bun. Excellent actually.
This was some pretty mediocre dim sum for the SGV. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s still tasty. Even bad dim sum is pretty good. And this wasn’t terrible, it’s not like some of the horrible ones in downtown or further west, but there are about 10 much better places within a mile or three! And it’s a cart dim sum which basically sucks. It’s hard to get the dishes you want. They’re cold when you do. You get them in the wrong order. Hungry party members insist on loading up on the bad fry they always drive by first. Much better to order from the sheet in waves.
After this I got two different two hour massages (because I couldn’t convince my normal place to do longer than two hours). THEN we went off to Shanghai #1 Seafood for an awesome dinner (way better than lunch).