Audio By Carbonatix
Like any road that’s well-traveled, the Silk Road sprouted many resting places along the way. At first these were simple teahouses that offered yum cha, the tea ritual, and a place to put your feet up; back in the tenth century, the Chinese thought that eating food while drinking tea would cause weight gain. But as China’s medical knowledge became more sophisticated, tea’s digestive qualities were discovered, and the teahouses began offering snacks as well. These snacks came to be known as dim sum.
The term comes from Canton, the province that took dim sum to its highest level, and while there are many suggested translations — “little heart warmers” and “dot hearts” among them — Cantonese sources say “touches the heart” comes the closest. (“Touches the tummy” might be more accurate.) Today there are more than 2,000 officially recognized dim sum recipes, although the average restaurant in China includes only a hundred or so in its daily dim sum repertoire. And in this country, the choices are even more limited. While cities such as New York and San Francisco boast dozens of Chinese restaurants that serve dim sum, many starting as early as dawn and continuing through mid-afternoon, Denver has only a handful of options, with most of those offering dim sum only on the weekends as an exotic brunch.
But now King’s Land Seafood Restaurant has joined the lineup, and this restaurant is as close as Denver is likely to come to re-creating a true dim sum experience. The 400-seat dining room can be chaotic — which means it’s more authentic — and there’s no dim sum menu, which is as it should be. Instead, servers push trolleys loaded with dim sum dishes between the tables, and the customers — Asian families, mostly — yell at the servers like basefall fans yelling at peanut vendors during a game. Only louder. Although the scene is less hectic on weekdays, when King’s Land serves dim sum from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the selection is also reduced: Only fifty dishes are offered, as opposed to about a hundred on weekends. But fewer choices and people also means that the ladies pushing those trolleys may have more time to answer questions and explain what’s inside each of the little packages.
Usually, though, you’re on your own. For the uninitiated, the exteriors of many dim sum items look the same — and because this isn’t a Whitman’s sampler box, you can’t stick your finger inside each treat to ascertain the contents, so you could wind up with the dim sum equivalent of strawberry-flavored goo. But that’s part of the fun, and since most dim sum dishes are very inexpensive, you can cut your losses and try another. At King’s Land, most dishes cost between $2 and $3.50 for a trio of items; at one recent brunch, a buddy and I stuffed ourselves sampling seven dim sum plates, and our pre-tip tab was still under $25 — including tea.
Of course, the dim sum ritual must start with tea, which is made to order using loose leaves (when you run out of tea, the proper procedure is to open the lid of the teapot and let it hang there, so the servers know to restock). Meanwhile, the servers start their rounds with the trolleys, each stacked with items from the four classifications of dim sum: steamed, including dumplings and pork buns; “variety,” such as chicken feet and pickled tidbits; deep-fried delights like egg rolls and shrimp balls; and the sweets, mostly custard-filled tarts and spongy steamed cakes. The trolleys always come around in that order: To the Chinese, eating the fried items before the steamed would be similar to an American starting a meal with mashed potatoes and then moving on to a salad.
Each trolley usually holds a half-dozen choices, which the server describes in rapid-fire succession. You point at your picks, and she slides them onto the table, either on a plate (buns, pastries and sweets, deep-fried items) or in the little metal basket in which they were steamed (dumplings and pot stickers), often accompanied by helpful suggestions. “Eat this sooner, not later,” one warned of the rice-paper-wrapped, shrimp-filled dumplings that did indeed harden up once they’d cooled off. Among the best items we tried: deep-fried ground shrimp covered with crunchy noodles that looked like tentacles; more ground shrimp served lollipop-style, with breadcrumb-coated shrimp balls impaled on sticks of sugar cane; steamed buns — sweet, glutinous balls of dough filled with spicy ground pork, scallions and teeny bits of carrot; and cigar-width, sesame-seed-studded, flaky pastries filled with barbecued pork bits. The sweets were also real treats, if not particularly sweet, and completely unlike anything our Snickers-snacking palates expected. The jun dui, little sticky-rice-based balls, came filled with lotus-seed paste, a thick, sweet mash of seeds noted for their medicinal qualities, mostly as a detoxifying agent. And since Chinese cooks steam rather than bake their cakes, the muffin-like little custard buns were moist and filled with a creamy egg concoction so faintly sugary that we had to think about the sugar to taste it.
Although we’d skip a few items on the next round, they were interesting to experience — once. The fatty pork riblets were gristly and turned into pig dental floss in our mouths; the wontons filled with shrimp and pork were so soaked with grease that they turned our stomachs. And the non-dim-sum dishes we tried seemed downright dull. Although King’s Land imported its cooks from Hong Kong, the restaurant is Cantonese at its core, and the usual lackluster sauces and washed-out flavors of that province ruled the main menu. The soup we ordered at one meal was the Asian equivalent of fish-flavored, scallion-studded farina with gelatinous bits of tasteless dried seaweed agar for extra texture; one bite of an entree order of shrimp in lobster sauce was enough to send me in search of the next trolley lady.
Overall, though, this was some dim sum — more than enough to keep my heart warm through the cold months ahead. I’ll be landing at King’s Land again soon.
