One of the Best Dining Experiences of My Life: Dim Sum

This past Saturday, I ate dim sum, and it was ridiculously awesome.

From what I understand, “dim sum” is a Chinese word that roughly translates to, “We keep bringing you small plates of Chinese food until you burst, and then we bring more.”

I was invited to the dim sum experience with 7 other people at Lu Lu’s Restaurant in St. Louis. We sat around a round table with a giant lazy susan in the middle.

Every few minutes, a server would come by the table with a big cart filled with plates of food. Our hostess would ask for a few dishes, which would be placed on the lazy susan. In no time the table was filled with a wide assortment of dishes, almost none of which we knew the names of.

That’s kind of the glory of dim sum (and why it would not work at all for picky eaters): It’s a veritable cornucopia of food, and part of the fun of it is biting into something without knowing in advance what it’s going to taste like.

Also, dim sum takes all the best parts of a buffet (an endless variety of food) and removes the bad parts (heat lamps, overconsumption, wasted food, the inconvenience of getting up from your seat).

Words can’t really describe how endless dim sum is. It just keeps coming and coming, and you keep eating and eating. But you’re not really gorging, because everything is broken down into small portions.

At one point in the middle of the onslaught of food, I looked at everyone and said, “This is the rest of our lives. We’re never leaving this table, are we?” It certainly felt that way.

To top it all off, we were never rushed to finish. There was a certain point where we stopped eating and accepting new dishes for a while, and we just relaxed and talked. You kind of forget about the food for a while, until you happen to glance at a potsticker and think, “Sure, I guess I could eat that.”

Dim sum. So amazing. I will be doing this again.

Have you ever tried it?