Every time I go home I always hit up 3 places: Pho 75, either Tachibana or Sushi Yoshi and then New Fortune for dim sum. But this time I was thinking of trying a different dim sum place just to "spice" things up. New Fortune has always been hit or miss with the quality of the food (sometimes the food is ice cold) but it's the largest dim sum restaurant in MD by far and it's close to my mom's house, so it's just always the lazy choice.
My mom had heard of Oriental East being quite popular so we decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning. Even though it was a holiday, the place was crazy crowded at 11:30am. I had read that people start lining up before the place opens at 11AM but I figured that since it was a holiday that it might not be as crowded - big mistake as clearly most Asians don't give a sh*t about Thanksgiving. We waited over an hour for them to call our number and I was about to pass out from hunger. The place is just not equipped to have many people waiting in their "lobby" and the carts are bumping into you left and right. Finally when they called our number it was like someone called out bingo! We got seated in what we thought was a pretty prime table but it turns out we were wrong as all the carts were going in the opposite direction so that by the time it got to us everything had been picked over completely. It took us forever just to get one cart to come by that had something that we wanted. We ordered steamed shrimp dumplings, sweat rice in a lotus leaf, shrimp rice noodle crepe, beef balls, chicken's feet, radish cakes, sesame balls, sweet tofu, and another shrimp and vegetable dumpling. They were all good dishes but nothing that I felt was worth waiting in line for an hour for but at least all the dishes were hot and tasted like they were freshly made. I was super bummed because the shu mai dumplings never came our way, despite us asking the waiter to help chase it down for us. I mean that is THE staple item of any dim sum experience and for them to run out is completely unacceptable to me.
This place is also probably cleaner than New Fortune and has less of a factory feel to it but I wasn't super impressed with the variety and just generally felt overwhelmed. I would recommend if you go to either come before they open or after 1pm - otherwise you will lose your mind waiting for a table. The other big advantage is that the prices seemed cheaper than New Fortune for the same quality food. Total bill: $44 for 3 people with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
No comments:
Post a Comment