Enjoy a dim sum lauriat at Li Li’s yum cha
May 5, 2005 | 12:00am
Those who want their daily dose of Chinese food but are not prepared to cough up the expense of a full-fledged lauriat dinner will enjoy the weekly Sunday yum cha at the Hyatt Hotel’s Li Li Cantonese Restaurant.
Yum cha is a popular Sunday tradition in Hong Kong and is a common practice all over China and countries like Singapore and Taiwan. More than drinking tea, yum cha is a long meal of dim sum, leafy vegetables, small portions of meat dishes, and classic desserts. Most Pinoy Chinese food enthusiasts would know it as simply dim sum lunch or dinner.
At Li Li, diners will be spoiled for choices since they will have around 30 varieties of dim sum to choose from. Hyatt food and beverage director William Yuen says the choices are not fixed, with the variety of dim sum, except for staples, changing every Sunday. And if you think you know your dim sum, then you’re dead wrong.
When we tried the Hyatt’s yum cha recently, we thought it would just be one of those dim sum lunches that would eventually culminate in a platter or two of entrees. We could not have been more wrong. With more than a dozen dim sum items laid on our table, it was simply a dim sum overload.
A sample of the Hyatt’s yum cha dim sum choices includes steamed dumplings with diced chicken and green vegetables, steamed beef dumplings, pan-fried pork dumplings Beijing-style, deep-fried prawns with sugar cane, deep-fried spring rolls with shredded duck and enoki mushrooms, steamed spareribs with Yunnan ham wrapped in lotus leaf, steamed chicken feet in black bean sauce, shark’s fin dumpling with crab meat and bamboo pith in bouillon, steamed shrimp dumplings "har gao," steamed pork dumplings with crab roe "sio mai," steamed barbecued pork buns, baked puff pastry filled with honey barbecued pork, wok-fried white turnip cake with XO chili sauce, poached meat dumpling Beijing-style, pan-fried pork bun, pan-fried rice rolls with dried shrimps, steamed rice rolls with barbecued pork, steamed rice rolls with shrimps, rice porridge with seafood and century egg, rice porridge with corn and vegetables, soy sauce fried noodle with shredded pork, wok-fried rice noodle with chicken in black bean sauce, braised e-fu noodle with mapo tofu, rice vermicelli soup with fish dumpling, baked egg tart, deep-fried mashed pumpkin stuffed with lotus seed paste and barbecued pork belly. That’s 27 items, of which we had, if my memory is to be trusted, 14 dim sum. That’s quite a lot for lunch, believe me. And no, we all resisted a bowl of rice. Instead, we nourished glassfuls of hot tea to wash everything down.
Yuen left us to appreciate Li Li’s variety of dim sum, but every so often, he would prepare us for a mouthful we were supposed to munch on that moment.
"What’s the difference between our sio mai and those from other restaurants?" he asked. Was this a surprise culinary quiz?
As we slowly chewed on the sio mai, the answer was obvious: Rather than a ball of ground meat stuffed with shrimp morsels, Li Li’s sio mai has chopped meat, as well as a generous topping of tabiko (Japanese egg roe).
"Most Chinese restaurants would use ground pork for their sio mai because it’s easier work for them," Yuen explains. "But here, we want you to experience the real thing. The pork is a combination of ground and chopped pork. That’s why with every bite, you get juicy pork chunks. We put a whole shrimp in our sio mai, but cut up into little pieces, so that you get a little with every bite."
The baked puff pastry filled with honey barbecued pork, Yuen’s favorite, was also a tasteful experience. The puff pastry was soft and flaky, sweet to the taste, crumbly to the touch. The honey barbecued pork filling was just like your asado siopao filling, but tastier. The sweet-salty pork complemented the sweet pastry.
As steamers of dim sum were placed on our table, we would reach out for each treat with our chopsticks. When our fingers failed us, we used a spoon. Dim sum this tasty rarely parade on my lazy Susan. You guessed it right; they had to roll me out of the restaurant at the end of the meal.
Li Li’s yum cha is priced at P780++ per person and will be available until June 30.
Those who can’t wait for Sunday yum cha should avail of Li Li’s Business Lunch, offered Monday to Saturday, from 12 to 2:30 p.m., at a special price of P680++. The Business Lunch menu is a five-course menu that comes with a main course of a meat, chicken or seafood dish, a vegetable dish, rice or noodles, dessert, and a choice of dim sum. Diners will have about a dozen dim sum varieties from a menu of choices, making this a delicious and economical way to enjoy Chinese food.
Yuen warns diners though not to overload on the dim sum because the main dishes are just as delicious. Point well taken.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
