Taste: China Gourmet, Philly’s best dim sum hall, is back at full speed

“Oh, so you’re eating inside again now?” says Salina Ko, looking up from her clipboard charting the long list of diners waiting one recent weekend for a table at China Gourmet’s dim sum extravaganza.

Yes, I said with a sheepish shrug, marveling at Ko’s photographic memory for her customers. It had been a few years since I’d visited China Gourmet in Northeast Philly, my favorite local Cantonese dim sum hall and the closest thing this city has to a Flushing-style dumpling palace. And at that grim point in the pandemic in early 2021, this massive 400-seat space had been restricted to just a tiny fraction of its seating capacity during the health crisis. Still unvaccinated, I had come to do takeout as a show of support. But I also worried then that this essential touchstone for Northeast Philly’s growing Chinese community — a usually boisterous dim sum hall jam-packed with round tables traced by rolling carts delivering dumplings for family-style dining — would never be the same. Thankfully, I was wrong.

“We are alive! We survived!” Ko told me with a broad smile, framed by red horns sprouting from the headband she wore so diners could spot her among crowd of hungry hopefuls that gathered near the restaurant’s entrance. “Just look for the horn lady!” she joked. Customers can often wait up to 45 minutes for a weekend table at this big supermarket strip mall location for China Gourmet, where Ko and her husband, chef Ming Feng, relocated in 2018, earning a rave review and spot on my Top 25 that year.

I was thrilled to see that the festive energy had returned. A sea of pink linen-topped round tables thrummed with 300-plus diners. A fleet of rolling carts continuously paused tableside to hand over metal steamer baskets of pristinely hand-pleated har gao shrimp dumplings, tender spare rib tips, tawny chicken feet, bright green piles of Chinese broccoli, and tea leaf bundles stuffed with sticky rice. As we took our own table, the hot tea began to flow through my little cup and my guests were a bit shocked as I said “yes!” to every single cart that came our way. But this felt like a celebration of a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. And within moments, every inch of our table was covered with food.

Delicately crimped dumplings made of translucent white dough stuffed with pork and peanuts. Open topped sui mei brimmed with notably tender ground pork and shrimp. Deep-fried shrimp balls wrapped in pastry streamers that looked like dumpling comets. Fluffy white “Snow Mountain buns” (xue shan bao) stuffed with barbecued cha siu pork, whose domed crusts are laced with the delicate crunch of baked sweet cream, a notably hard-to-find specialty. In fact, in the Philly area,so many of the 50-plus dumplings and little dishes can only be found done so well here at China Gourmet. One thing you won’t find are xiao long bao, the popular soup dumplings that are a specialty of Shanghai, because China Gourmet’s kitchen is strictly Cantonese.

Ming’s kitchen makes a dizzying variety of other items daily, but especially on weekends, when over 1,200 customers typically come through the room. And the food is as good as ever, from the pan-crisped shrimp and chive dumplings, to the long hot peppers stuffed with fish paste (more tender and subtly flavored than the typical shrimp paste filling), and shrimp cakes encrusted in matchstick shreds of fried taro. And there are more recent offerings, too, like the baton-sized shrimp rolls rolled in cracker-crisp sheets of fried bean curd, which the servers snip with scissors.

I would have kept going to explore more of the carts, and then stayed for dinner to indulge China Gourmet’s fish tank of giant live crabs, geoduck clam sashimi, and lobsters (Hong Kong-style is my favorite) — if only I had the appetite. But I’ll save that for another day. Ko and Ming plan to bring more of this dim sum experience soon to weekends at Jin Ding, the old Yangming space in Bryn Mawr that the couple purchased just couple months prior to the pandemic. The unfortunate timing, along with adjusting to the different tastes of a broader Main Line audience, has no doubt accounted for its relatively slow start. I’m reassured to know, however, that China Gourmet is back to where we left it prior to the pandemic, its kitchen of dim sum wonders rolling along full dumpling speed ahead.

2842 St. Vincent St. Philadelphia, PA 19149. Tel: 215-941-1898; phillychinagourmet.com

Average cost of a dim sum meal per customer, $20.

Free parking lot.

Wheelchair accessible.