Tim Ho Wan

I finally fulfilled a promise to make dim sum a stop on the family dumpling tour: it’s astonishing to think my child has reached her current age without my having done this before. I blame late capitalism. After a busy morning out and about, we opted for a nearby option, the East Village outpost of Tim Ho Wan. This was a very pleasant, calm dim sum experience—ordering from a menu rather than hailing carts and pointing at things until your table is full and/or you collapse from overindulgence.

Reflecting on the menu and the importance of the occasion, I decided to relax our usual no-meat constraint temporarily. The house-specialty baked pork buns were a giant child hit, as you would expect of a charsiu-filled sweet pastry. I thought the har gau were especially fine, with lovely delicate wrappers and an exceptionally savory filling. The translucent steamed mushroom dumplings were also delicious; only by looking at the menu online, where they are labeled 荷芹素菜餃 hé qín sùcài jiǎo, do I learn that these had Chinese celery as well as lotus root in them. In the less-kid-friendly “slippery” category of foods, I had cheung fun and permitted the obviously questionable decision to get osmanthus-flavored jelly with goji berries, which I alone enjoyed.

The selection was fairly constrained, and Tim Ho Wan is committed to its Hong Kong style: that meant I could not deliver on my earlier fatherly promise of soup dumplings. However, now that we live in New York, that kind of problem is very easily solved: when we finished, we just moved on to Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao nearby: see the next entry.

Source: Tim Ho Wan, East Village

Dumpling type: Baked BBQ pork buns, steamed vegetarian dumplings with mushrooms, celery and lotus root, har gau, cheung fun (does it count as a dumpling? it’s dough wrappled around a filling, so I say yes).

Modality: dine in

Adult rating: 🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟

Child rating: 🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟