yum yum, dim sum

According to online searches, Yangtze Restaurant has some of the best dim sum in the Twin Cities. Dim sum is only available on Saturday and Sundays, from 10am to 2pm, and according to reviews, the place gets busy, so we arrived five minutes before opening time, and there were already about seven cars [with people waiting inside them] parked outside the restaurant. The doors didn't open on time, the crowd shuffled in around 10:04am. About 70% of the customers were Chinese [the rest were white], that's always a good sign. There was a note on the door, they were open for dim sum on Christmas day, we would have come had we known about it earlier! I was actually looking for a dim sum place for x'mas...

Located in the St. Louis Park neighborhood, the outside of the restaurant isn't much to look at, it's located in a strip mall, next to a nail salon. The interior is much better, it actually feels like a decent Chinese restaurant, and not some cheap hole in the wall. 

We were seated at a two top, next to an elderly white couple. Not one minute later, a perky waitress [they all seem fluent in both English and Cantonese] pulls up with her dim sum cart between the two tables, and starts listing to our neighbors what was in the cart: har gow, shumai, char siew bao, sticky rice shrimp balls, chicken feet, beef tripe, crab and shrimp dumplings, shrimp with cilantro, spare ribs, Shanghai juicy dumplings, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, yes, and yes! Jamie and I looked at each other, I think we wanted almost everything on that cart. We ended up with six "medium" plates, and then the waitress with the fried food cart came over... uh oh... we picked out the fried taro dumplings, fried shrimp balls, and shrimp with chives. And then another waitress had the cheong fun tray, we had to have a plate of that, it's one of my favorites. So we might have ended up with too much food for just the two of us. We didn't even have any dessert [egg tarts, coconut tarts, pineapple tarts, the list goes on...], Jamie didn't even have space for his sesame balls.

It was fast service and we must have wolfed our dim sum down, because we were done with our meal in about half an hour. We almost managed to finish everything, there were two shrimp balls left over. It wasn't the best dim sum we've ever had, but it was good enough to satisfy my craving. The bill came to just under $50 for ten plates. We will be back, for sure!