I've been to Chicago so many times in the past 15 years that there are hardly any neighborhood or touristy things left to do. But somehow, Chinatown has alluded me all these years (although Deanna did remind me that apparently we did go together once in college with our moms - clearly I blocked that out of my head).
So finally we decided to cross this off both of our Chicago to-do lists on a nice Saturday afternoon. The Chinatown in Chicago is kind of out of the way and not near much - it's also waaay smaller than most urban Chinatowns but it's kind of nice to not have it be an overflowing chaotic mess like it is in NYC (although I do have a soft spot for the craziness of it all). The Chinatown here is very manageable and you can probably get through all of it in an hour if you aren't doing too much window shopping. But of course, no trip to Chinatown is complete without a dim sum outing. Cai has been a few Chicago Chinatown lists, so this was our first stop.
Like any typical dim sum restaurant, this one is a large, tacky, banquet hall with large tables. Usually I would expect a dim sum place at noon on Saturday to be a complete mob scene, but it wasn't too bad here with only about a 15 minute wait. It was nice that we didn't have to share a large communal table with others. What's different about the service here is that instead of the usual push carts that come around most traditional dim sum places, here you order from a picture menu and then they bring it out to you. While it kind of diminishes the fun and feel of dim sum, it's also kind of genius too. There's no fighting over carts, you can get exactly what you want without waiting around for it and since it's not circling around on a cart for hours, the food comes out pipping hot. The menu here was typical, it has everything you would normally get at a dim sum place. Small dishes are $2.99, Medium $3.79, Large $3.99, XL $4.00 and Special $5.25. Most items on the menu are in the medium to large range. We ordered the har-gow, sticky rice in lotus leaf, pork and shrimp shumai, tapioca custard, pan fried bean curd with mixed vegetable, vegetable with tofu, golden corn pie, baked green chive puffs, and turnip cake. Obviously the first 3 items were for me since they all had either pork or shrimp in it. I gotta say, they were all quite delicious and tasted like they were just made in the kitchen. I was very impressed with the quality of the food - none of it was anything particularly unique or sophisticated but just really solid. Unfortunately a few of the dishes that we got that we thought were veggie friendly (corn pie and green chive puff) turned out to have shrimp in them. The restaurant was very nice in taking them back and not charging us for it - which I greatly appreciated. Of the veggie dishes, the vegetable with tofu was most definitely the best because it was wrapped in large broad rice noodles. It's the veggie version of my all time favorite dim sum dish: the shrimp roll (I didn't order it here because this one apparently had celery in it which I hate).
Since we had to send 2 of the veggie dishes back, Deanna also ordered the mushroom and corn congee. I should have known that the serving was be huge. Unfortunately, by the time we got it, we were so full with our other dishes that we didn't really need to order it at all so we ended up taking home a lot of food. The one dish that was kind of weird was the tapioca custard. Neither of us have had it before and it was basically a giant gelatinous ball with a sweet custard center - it was kind of like eating a giant bland clear mochi ball. It wasn't terrible but not particularly great either.
Overall, I was fairly impressed with my experience here. I can't say the service was super attentive but that's to be expected. It was definitely a very pleasant and calm dim sum experience - which I know is a bit of the opposite of what you might actually want from dim sum - but the food was quality and worth the trek. Total bill: $21/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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