W. Blake Gray

Pan-fried chive dumplings

​What better way to spend a weekend morning than over dim sum? Waitresses keep offering you tidbits of pork and shrimp, your endless pot of tea gets refilled without asking if you leave the lid up (there's a veteran tip), and at almost every place on this list, six people can eat until you're bored, full or both for less than $20 a person.

San Francisco ain't Hong Kong or Singapore, but for dim sum outside of Chinese-speaking metropoli, we've got it pretty good. A couple months ago SFoodie brought a wine writer from New York to one of our favorite places and he said, "Wow, we don't have dim sum like this," and not because we made him eat chicken feet. Though when you get to number 5 on this list, we strongly suggest that you do.

The best dim sum in San Francisco is not found in Chinatown. Instead, look north of Golden Gate Park, although top spots are found as far afield as Daly City. And a warning to vegetarians, as well as people persnickety about service: You'll be happiest at the places with the fewest Chinese diners. Because for the rest of us, the best way to find a new favorite dish is to not ask questions, but point at it and dig in.

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Photos by W. Blake Gray

Pea sprout & white nuts in broth

​Whenever we hear of a dim sum restaurant -- heck, any restaurant -- that has people milling around outside waiting to get in, we're intrigued.

Such is the case on Sundays at River Side Seafood Restaurant. If you don't get there well before noon, you're going to wait, unless you're a party of two.

It's not a huge room: there are 14 round tables, three booths, and exactly one table for two. Not many couples go to dim sum, apparently, at least on the southern edge of the Sunset. So we waltzed right in, past at least half a dozen large groups.

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Photos by W. Blake Gray

"Crude Drugs Chicken Feet"

​We admit that we ordered Crude Drugs Chicken Feet as a joke. Was the joke on us? They turned out to be the best chicken feet we've ever had.

​And it made Golden Gate Dim Sum Seafood Restaurant feel like quite the find. We ran "best dim sum" through Yelp's search engine and this restaurant came up 49th in San Francisco, which just goes to show how undiscerning Yelp is, but of course we knew that.

While we wouldn't bring our Aunt Myrtle here, Golden Gate is a fine, cheap, second-tier place to bring dim sum veterans or friends who are new to the whole experience.

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W. Blake Gray

​We saw this menu and of course we had to order No. 46. We think drugs are simply too refined these days. Who needs heroin, for example, when you can have opium?

So how was the dish? We had an extreme reaction. We'll tell all in the next installment of our ongoing series of reviewing dim sum restaurants.

We noticed that nobody in the Bay Area was reviewing dim sum restaurants on a consistent basis. Guidebooks all plug Yank Sing; many also note Ton Kiang. But how about those tiny places on Clement Street or in Chinatown where people mill outside waiting on Sunday afternoons? Dim sum is an integral part of this city's food culture, but getting the straight dope on restaurants after the top names has been impossible, until now.

We promise, we'll tell you all about Crude Drugs Chicken Feet, as soon as we recover. In the meantime check out these dim sum restaurants we've already reviewed:

Lee Hou

South Sea Seafood Village

House of Banquet

Happy Garden

Yet Wah

Photos by W. Blake Gray

Shanghai dumplings

​We wound up at Happy Garden because Good Luck Dim Sum across the street had a long line, and we felt like sitting down.

Happy Garden has a dim sum menu. And we ordered from it. We were hungry. Only after we ordered and began paying attention to what everyone around us was eating did we realize our mistake.

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Photos by W. Blake Gray

Green tea balls

​The cabbage god is the first thing you see when you step inside House of Banquet in the Inner Richmond. We eat a lot of dim sum, but we haven't gone anywhere else where cabbage is worshipped.

All hail the cabbage god

​It's possible that House of Banquet's owners venerate cabbage in the Hindu sense, as a deity too important to eat. We didn't get any cabbage in any of the eight items we had, but maybe we just weren't paying attention when the cabbage god's cart rolled by.

We wonder how many casual visitors walk into House of Banquet and walk right out again, thinking that it's empty and weird besides. While there's an entire dining room downstairs, we've never seen anybody eating there. The action is upstairs, in a huge room that gets crowded by 11 a.m. on weekends and is not the most English-speaker-friendly place in town.

Fortunately, language skills are not so important here. Unusually for its stretch of Clement Street, House of Banquet is a rolling-cart dim sum house, not a menu-order place. Thus we don't know exactly how much anything we asked for cost. We do know that our total bill for four people, eight items, was $28.48, and we left full, so we didn't feel the need to call over one of the English-speaking hosts to itemize. Besides, at least 20 diners were hanging out on the stairs, waiting to take our table.

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Photos by W. Blake Gray

​Most dim sum houses have a selection of tea, but don't usually advertise it. Somebody says, "Tea?" You say yes, and you get a pot of watery oolong made from the cheapest tea bags available.

South Sea Seafood Village has a small sideline in selling imported teas, including one of only dried rosebuds, and discs of expensive aged pu-erh. So it's no wonder South Sea Seafood (say it 10 times fast) has a special tea menu stapled to the regular dim sum menu.

In a very good dim sum restaurant, the special tea is the best deal.

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Photos by W. Blake Gray

Pan-fried chive dumplings

​Because it's only a couple blocks from Ton Kiang, which has some of the biggest crowds outside of any dim sum restaurant in town, Yet Wah gets occasional spillover business. But the main crowd is mostly locals, mostly speaking Chinese.

The room is large, with a small, sparsely populated fish tank at one end. Yet Wah is mostly a menu-order place, but servers stroll by with trays as well.

The 94 items on the dim-sum order menu are fairly cheap. There are 12 $2 dishes and a lot of common orders at $2.50 and $3.30. There are also a few items that could be light, very cheap lunches on their own, like the spareribs and sausage rice bowl ($3.60). A few common items are more expensive, like foil-wrapped chicken ($5.50).

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​Lee Hou wasn't always this garish. When we started going there a few years ago, it was a dingy place that happened to have good, cheap baked pork buns, which is among our favorite dishes.

The restaurant changed owners in 2008, and the new management wants to make sure you notice. Lurid photo posters of various main-menu dishes line one wall. Lines of colored tinsel stretch across the ceiling; hanging lanterns and red paper dragons compete for your attention.

Fortunately, if the prices have gone up, we didn't notice. Lee Hou is still a place where two people can eat dim sum, if you're careful, for under $20. We're not that careful; we spent nearly $25. But we gladly paid the extra $5 because it included perhaps the best dim sum dessert we've had yet.

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