Kay Cheung: Pretty Much a Midwestern Diner with Dumplings

​It finally hit me, visiting Kay Cheung, my third Chinatown dim sum restaurant in three weeks, that I was going about the whole business of yum cha in Chinatown the wrong way. For me, dim sum has always been weekend brunch -- a Saturday morning excursion preceding a long nap on the couch. An event. There are plenty of places out in the Avenues and Daly City that serve event-worthy dim sum. 

But the 70-year-old men sharing our table at Kay Cheung were the same guys who, in Indiana or Minnesota, would claim a table at the local diner, order a bottomless cup of coffee, and sit for hours. Maybe they'd have some eggs, then read the paper. A little while later, they'd take a piece of pie, if the waitress didn't mind. 

And that's what these guys were there for. Every 20 minutes, they'd call the waiter over and ask for something else -- maybe one of the leek-and-shrimp dumplings she was carrying around, or a  bowl of steamed greens and pork with a little rice to be brought from the kitchen. Every five minutes, one of the pair would launch over a conversational volley, to be returned by the other, and they'd bat it about until it dropped. 

We spent a pleasant hour that way, ignoring but not ignoring one another, occasionally dropping the pretense to peer over more closely at a plate or give the thumbs-up to a dish I was considering on the waiter's tray.

What more can I say about the restaurant? It's pretty much a bare-bones dim sum house, tables all full on a weekday, so packed that the waiters wind around the chairs bearing trays instead of pushing carts. Kay Cheung's food is a half-grade better than New Asia's or Peninsula Seafood's, perhaps, and a half-grade less polished than Great Eastern's dim sum. 

There were deep-fried rolls of shrimp encased in tofu skin, middling spare ribs steamed with black beans, flaky pastries filled with ginger-spiked lotus root, shark-fin dumpling with no shark fin, and soup dumplings with no soup. Pea leaves stir-fried with garlic were silky with oil; they went down fast, but bumped up our check almost $15. We had a few interesting dishes -- two-inch patties of shrimp and pork, faintly sweet, that I'd never encountered before, and taro puffs whose exteriors were so lacy and high they resembled Donkey Kong fireballs. 

But, you know, ordering all those dishes at once was treating Kay Cheung as an event, when really, I should have showed up with a book and an hour to kill, slowly whittling down an order of clay pot rice and a steamer of some spareribs, companionably not conversing with the guys sitting around the table with me. Someday, when I have a day to myself, I just might do that, just to see if we end up exchanging real words.

Kay Cheung: 615 Jackson (at Cooper Alley), 989-6838.

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