Here, finally, is a report on our first meal on our Southern California trip in December. This was originally scheduled to be a sushi meal. We were supposed to arrive right before lunch time and the plan was to stop in Torrance for lunch at Nozomi before heading to Seal Beach. But our flight was delayed by more than three hours, and by the time we got our bags and picked up the rental car there was no way we could have made it to Nozomi before they closed for the afternoon. And so we changed the call to dim sum—after sushi, the other genre of food our family loves that we can only get very inferior versions of in Minnesota. Of course, you wouldn’t think that if your only source of information was the local Minnesota food press. According to them, there is very good dim sum available in Minnesota. Just recently a popular food website gave yet another rave review to Mandarin Kitchen, a restaurant at which we’ve only had farcical experiences (the most recent one reviewed here). As such, we always make it a point to eat dim sum at least once on our Southern California trips. And on this trip it was on the very first day. How did it go? Read on. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Lunasia
Dim Sum at Lunasia, Again (Los Angeles, January 2019)
Dim sum is always high on our eating agenda when visiting Los Angeles. While there are some in the Twin Cities who seem to genuinely believe that there is dim sum here as good as anywhere else in the US, this has not been our experience in the 12 years we have been eating dim sum in Minnesota. And believe me, I would really, really love it if that were true. There are indeed cuisines and culinary genres in which the Twin Cites now have solid representation that matches well with all but the biggest and most diverse metros but dim sum is not one of those. On our trip to LA this winter, however, dim sum was not very high on my agenda. This because I was just a few weeks away from having eaten a number of dim sum and other dumpling-related meals in Hong Kong (see here). The missus, of course, was having none of that, not having been in Hong Kong with me. And so off we went to the San Gabriel Valley, the day before our return to southern Minnesota. Usually we’d go to Sea Harbour or Elite but on this occasion we decided to go back to Lunasia. We really enjoyed our meal there a few years ago with Sku and his family. Alas, the families couldn’t get together for dim sum on this trip—though we did eat some excellent Korean food together (on which more soon)—but we did manage to enjoy this outing by ourselves. Continue reading